In the Gray Zone with Tina Modotti

This Photography Which Is Not One: In the Gray Zone with Tina Modotti

CAROL ARMSTRONG

Prolegomena: Speaking from the Body June 25. I must take time to write about the reactions to my shell prints, as written by Tina from Mexico after showing them to several old acquaintances. First, to quote brieﬂy the most salient remarks. “My God, Edward, your last photography surely took my breath away! I feel speechless in front of them. What purity of vision. When I opened the package I couldn’t look at them very long, they stirred up all my inner- most feelings so that I felt a physical pain.” Later—same morning— “Edward—nothing before in art has affected me like these photographs. I cannot look at them long without feeling exceedingly perturbed, they disturbed me not only mentally but physically. There is something so pure and at the same time so perverse about them. They contain both the innocence of natural things and the morbidity of a sophisticated, distorted mind. They make me think of lilies and embryos. They are mystical and erotic.”1 So wrote Tina Modotti to Edward Weston concerning her reaction to his photographs of shells. Or rather, so Weston quoted Modotti reacting to his photographs of shells, carefully entering sections of her letters to him from Mexico, where she had remained after his ﬁnal departure for California the year before, in his photographic diaries. Of course, the so-called “Daybooks” are

1. See Nancy Newhall, ed., The Daybooks of Edward Weston (Millerton, N.Y.: Aperture, 1961/1973), vol. 2 (California), 1927, “4. The Shells in Mexico: Letters from Tina Modotti,” p. 31. On the Daybooks, see Shelley Rice, “The Daybooks of Edward Weston: Art, Experience, and Photographic Vision,” in Beaumont Newhall and Amy Conger, eds., Edward Weston Omnibus: A Critical Anthology (Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith, Inc., Peregrine Smith Books, 1984), pp. 187–92. See also Amy Stark, ed., “The Letters from Tina Modotti to Edward Weston,” The Archive (Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona Research Series 22, 1986), and Margaret Gibson, Memories of the Future: The Daybooks of Tina Modotti (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990). It is worth remarking that 1927, the year of the shell print episode, was also the year Modotti joined the Communist Party, marking, among other things, the divergence between her path and Weston’s.

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something more than diaries; clearly written with posterity in view, they do much more than log Weston’s day-to-day dealings in the darkroom, bedroom, studio, and field. They construct the myth of Weston as Grand Master of the Photographic Beautiful.2 And they do so in relation to a series of ranked and conquered lesser figures, of whom Modotti is the prime representative; indeed, she serves as the voice, ventriloquized by Weston, of all that is mastered and sublimated in his photography: the oracle of the Other. In later entries, Weston went on to quote Modotti quoting other Others. That same evening, “Felipe and Pepe” were “carried away” with the sensuousness of the shells. The next morning René d’Harnoncourt was reported (by Modotti to Weston, who then reported it to himself) to see the shells as “‘erotic’” too, to find them disturbing, to feel “‘weak at the knees’” in the face of them. On July 4, Diego Rivera’s “first breath-taking impression” was described to Weston by Modotti, and then entered in his “Daybooks”—“ . . . ‘These photographs are biological, beside the aesthetic emotion they disturb me physically,—see my forehead is sweating’”; Rivera, says Modotti as recorded by Weston, went on to wonder if “‘W. [was] very sensual?’ . . . ” Finally, on July 7, Weston reported that Modotti reported that José Clemente Orozco reacted to the shells by thinking first of Rodin’s Hand of God and then, like “‘everybody, including myself, . . . of the sexual act.’” In the context of these entries’ quotations of quotations, that “including myself” is confusing: is “myself” Orozco or Modotti? Or is it Weston himself?—until one realizes that it couldn’t be . . . or could it? Well, no. In that same entry, Weston reacted to these layers of reactions, reported at second and third remove. He interjected the following: Why were all these persons so profoundly affected on the physical side? For I can say with absolute honesty that not once while working with the shells did I have any physical reaction to them: nor did I try to record erotic symbolism. I am not sick and I was never so free from sexual suppression. . . .

No! I had no physical thoughts,—never have. I worked with clearer vision of sheer aesthetic form. I knew that I was recording from within, my feeling for life as I never had before. Or better, when the negatives were actually developed, I realized what I felt,—for when I worked, I was never more unconscious of what I was doing.

No! The Shells are too much a sublimation of all my work and life to be pigeon-holed. Others must get from them what they bring to them: evidently they do!3

2. On this myth, see Hollis Frampton, “Impromptus on Edward Weston: Everything in Its Place,” October 5 (Summer 1978), pp. 48–69. 3. Daybooks of Edward Weston, vol. 2, 1927, p. 32.

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In the course of this elaborate dénegation, Weston admitted he was “not blind to the sensuous quality in shells, with which they combine the deepest spiritual significance: indeed it is this very combination of the physical and spiritual in a shell like the chambered nautilus, which makes it such an important abstract of life.” What, besides expressing the veneration, indeed the abject prostration of others before the magisterial accomplishments of Weston, was the point of going to such lengths to record precisely those reactions he most wished to deny? Exactly that: to speak what he wished to suppress, to have someone else—several someone elses—do the speaking, so that what they voiced so plurally and incoherently (so “speechless[ly]”) could be doubly expelled yet at the same time expressed, and then emphatically to reject their utterances, all the more resoundingly for having sounded them in the first place. But not quite to silence or subdue them. For what Weston enacts in his “Daybooks” entries of June and July 1927 is—and these are virtually his own words—the structure of sublimation itself, complete with the component of close-to-the-surface repression contained in it: the rising of the aesthetic up out of the erotic, the uplifting of base sensuality into the authority of the sensuous abstraction, the distilling and purifying of the bodily, in short, the making sublime of the sexual, wherein the erotic, the sensual, the bodily nevertheless lies swooning—forehead sweating and knees trembling— just beneath the sublimity of the perfect photograph.4 From ejaculation to counterejaculation, Weston affirms and negates and then affirms and negates again the carnal substratum of his artistry with the camera. At the same time, protesting too much, he speaks the return of the suppressed, reiteratively. What of Modotti in all of this? For she, not Weston—or rather, her photographs, not Weston’s—is the subject of this essay. Clearly Modotti colluded in Weston’s view of himself and his photography in relation to others. She wrote the letters, after all, helping to produce an image of Weston, even after the fact of their intimacy, very much in tune with earlier photographs she had taken of him in Mexico, when the two of them were together there in 1923 and ’24. There Weston stands with his view camera, sharp-eyed, commanding, singularly upright, his outsized optical instrument the exaggerated phallic extension of himself, morphing his body into the hard-edged implement of the artistic gaze. (Nothing

4. Sigmund Freud’s analysis of sublimation, as a psychological technique, related to but different from repression, in which the child’s sexual and corporeal investigations are elevated and converted into the higher curiosities of the human arts and sciences, is most famously given in “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,” in James Strachey, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2: Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Leonardo da Vinci and Other Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), pp. 631–37. But in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1975), where he charts the development of “normal” sexuality toward “the primacy of a single erotogenic zone” and “a ﬁrm organization directed towards a sexual aim attached to some extraneous sexual object” (p. 63), Freud gives a deﬁnition of sublimation even better adapted to our purposes in its relation to “scopophilia,” and to the eventual privileging of sight over touch (with “looking,” however, “ultimately derived from touching”): as a diversion “in the direction of art, . . . interest . . . shifted away from the genitals on to the shape of the body as a whole” (I. The Sexual Aberrations, “Touching and Looking,” pp. 22–23).

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could be further from the way Weston represented Modotti during the same period, wearing blousy Mexican folk garb, nonchalantly dangling her camera like a handbag, slouching against a Mexican adobe embankment with a Mexican friend—signifying Latinicity, above all else, but also modelhood, the supplementar- ity of her camera, and her nonsingularity.)5 It is hard to know whether there might not have been an unwitting element of spoof in Modotti’s earlier image of Weston—he is so pompous and patently posed, replete with pipe in mouth echoing the larger diagonal and lens of his view camera—and, if so, whether Weston might not have shared in the satirizing of himself. But one thing is certain, that by the time Modotti wrote to him about his shell prints in 1927 and no matter how inadvertently funny both her and her friends’ reactions, and Weston’s recording of and reactions to those reactions might be to us now, she was entirely serious, and so was Weston.

5. This comparison and one other (between Modotti’s Cloth Folds and Weston’s Circus Tent) are suggested by the images gathered in Sarah M. Lowe’s Tina Modotti, Photographs (New York, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1995). In Weston’s photograph of her, Modotti plays the role of Mexican (even though she was an Italian immigrant to the U.S. who was living as an expatriot in Mexico), and thus in this image of her and in others several exoticisms are elided.

Left: Edward Weston. Tina Modotti and Miguel Covarrubias. c. 1924.© 1981 Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents. Right: Tina Modotti. Edward Weston with a Camera. c. 1923–24. Courtesy New Orleans Museum of Art.

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What interests me most about Modotti’s letters to Weston concerning Weston’s photography, as recorded by Weston in his “Daybooks,” is the way the role they assign to Tina and her cohorts echoes the aesthetic tactics of her photographs in the period from 1924 to 1927. This is particularly true of those photographs most closely related to Weston’s before and after him—the plant close-ups, the architectural and other “abstractions,” the photographs of hands and body parts. That is what I want to pursue here—the ways in which Modotti’s photographic work in the New Vision mode manifests the same physical under- belly of that vision that she articulated in her letters: the haptics under Weston’s optics, the corporeal soma of his aesthetic sublime, a photography “weak at the knees.” Modotti the photographer has so often been overshadowed by her erst- while lover, her own beauty as a body, her status as Latina par excellence, even her image as avant-garde muse and comrade-in-arms, that it might seem an odd choice to select: not the more directly political and reportorial work—the Communist symbols and labor series—the work at the furthest remove from Weston’s, which Weston most disdained, but her work as a Westonian aesthete. It might seem peculiar, that is, to select for emphasis those images that appear to confirm the image of Modotti as Weston’s sidekick.6 But what I want to explore here is precisely the difference of Modotti’s photography. And that suggests taking her work in relation to the norm supplied by Weston’s—the norm as both she and Weston construed it. It involves taking her aesthetic choices seriously, adding them up to an aesthetic project that both underwrote and unconsciously undermined the program of the “straight” photograph as Weston began to develop it in the years during which he was together with Modotti. It suggests, too, looking at the ways in which Modotti’s photography was determining for Weston’s as much as his was determining for hers, and at the same time seeing how divergent each one was from the other in their photographies. It proposes, finally, to find Modotti’s celebrated otherness in her photographs, rather than in her person, and to locate her sedition in the subliminality of her formal strategies rather than in the politics that she consciously avowed.

6. The literature on Modotti is extensive, but with some exceptions it testifies more to the romance of her persona and biography (one several times linked to that of Frida Kahlo) and her iconic status for Mexico, for feminism, and for the left, than to the interest in her images: among others, see Octavio Paz, “Frida y Tina: Vidas no paralelas,” Vuelta, September 1983, p. 48; Laura Mulvey (with Peter Wollen), “Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti,” Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 81–107; Ellen Melinkoff, “Who Was Tina Modotti?,” Arts and Antiques 9 (1992), pp. 58–63; Elena Poniatowska, Tinísima (Mexico City: Era, 1992); Ricardo Toffoletti, Tina Modotti: Perché non muore el fuoco (Udine: Arti Graﬁche Friulane, 1992); Mildred Constantine, Tina Modotti: A Fragile Life (London: Bloomsbury, 1993); Margaret Hooks, Tina Modotti: Photographer and Revolutionary (London: Pandora, 1993); Patricia Albers, Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1999); and most recently (and least biographically), Andrea Noble, Tina Modotti: Image, Texture, Photography (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000).

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Haptic Optics

I begin, not at the beginning, with Modotti’s earliest photographs, but at the moment of the letters quoted in the “Daybooks,” and with the object of everyone’s cited admiration, Weston’s shell prints, produced and received three years after Modotti opened up this close-up vein and Weston began to mine it. The quintes- sential photograph in this series is the one that Weston, while admitting he was “not blind to the sensuous quality in shells,” described as an “important abstract,” a “combination of the physical and spiritual,” in other words the epitome of the structure of sublimation articulated above: the Nautilus Shell. The Nautilus Shell represents the distillation and refinement of Paul Strand’s ethos of the “straight” photograph, as well as the advance-notice apotheosis of the values of the f.64 group, when it formed five years later: sharpness, stopped-down aperture, and technophilia, but also Weston’s cherished “previsualization”—seeing the final print in its full black- and-white tonal scale in the object when one looks at it to photograph it—and its later schematization by Ansel Adams in the form of the so-called “zone system.”7 At the same time it represents the reduction of the old luxury still life—the pronkstilleben with its array of expensive, imported objects, including the nautilus cup beloved of Willem Kalf and others, demonstrating the intersection between the artifices of Nature and Man—to One: one single beautiful thing, its coiled, elegant form perfectly contained, as in the dark velvet interior of a jewel box. It is as if the rectangle of the photograph were that box—incarnating the union of the artistries of sea creature and camera in its steely, opalescent gleam, at once secreted pearl and emulsified silver, the one identified absolutely with the other. Sliced by the knife before it is cut by the camera shutter, the nautilus is simultaneously halved and centered, so that its bisection and its singularity seem to be one and the same, a natural fact surrendered up to the incisive eye of the photographer who pierces the outer shell and sees to the very core of the thing. It is thus that the nautilus shell yields the effect of its own essence and justifies its own name: an utterly autonomous, perfectly interiorized, chambered shape, almost architectural in its sectioning, and like the photograph itself a consummate blend of auto- generated optical surface and self-spawned inner structure, of the sensuous and the rational—or the “physical” and the “spiritual,” as Weston put it. It is thus, finally, that the Nautilus Shell harvested the reactions that it did, whereby others were struck dumb by its sensuality while its author insisted on its sublimity. Clearly, there was something about the nautilus shell that made its viewers understand its mechanical-uterine form as an erotic figure and its penetration by knife, eye, and camera as something like a “sexual act,” as if the photographed

7. On the zone system, see Ansel Adams, The Negative (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, A New York Graphic Society Book, 1981); and Examples: The Making of Forty Photographs (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, A New York Graphic Society Book, 1983). See also Adams, “Edward Weston” (1964), in Newhall and Conger, Edward Weston Omnibus, pp. 117–23.

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shell were a body entered and possessed, and the camera eye a phallus: as if, without representing a woman, it were the ne plus ultra of the “male gaze,” seeing deeper than the vaginal darkness that lies at the crux of so many of Weston’s later nude compositions to the very womb, not of a female body, but of Nature herself.8 This effect—of a voluptuary nature morte and a libidinous seeing to match it, of an object reamed by the eye (ever so grandly)—was enhanced by some of Weston’s other shell prints, in which shells are shown in their glossy volumes, looking like pearly ﬂesh, and sometimes, when there are more than one, like sybaritic bodies intertwined and interpenetrated. For, just as clearly, and despite its insistent essentialism and singularity—its effect of the-thing-in-itself—the Nautilus Shell made its viewers think of other things besides itself: of “lilies and embryos,” “the sexual act,” Rodin’s high sculptural erotics, and no doubt Weston’s other work as well. Indeed, the Nautilus Shell also represents the climax of Weston’s series of close-up single objects run- ning from the Excusado of 1925 through the Pepper of 1930 (not to mention the Eggslicer, the Bedpan, the Artichoke Halved, the Onion Halved, the Cabbage Halved (and Quartered), the Gourd, the Chard, the Winter Squash, the White Radish, etc.— and then later, the untitled body parts, breast, buttocks, feet, and so on). And from the Excusado, that “toilet, that glossy enameled receptacle of extraordinary beauty,” which Weston came upon in his Mexican household and described as “the ‘human form divine’ but minus imperfections,” “the Victory of Samothrace” with “chaste convolutions and . . . swelling, sweeping . . . ﬁnely progressing contours,” while his ménage mocked it and the housemaid polished it, to the sinuous Pepper and other fruits and vegetables, which Weston, having culled them from the food market, had to photograph before they rotted or his sons ate them, the photographer himself clearly thought of other things besides the-thing-in-itself, and sought to make others think of them too. (Weston, for one, thought of “beautiful women,” while denying that his mind held “lecherous images.”)9 What everyone was thinking about, it seems, was the same relay between sexuality and sublimation, expressed by a chain of abstractly beautiful yet evocatively carnal objects, each one

8. Throughout his Daybooks—the entries are too frequent to cite here—Weston himself linked sexual to photographic conquest, repeatedly following comments about “scoring” with one woman or another with remarks about getting one object or another properly on ﬁlm, or vice versa. 9. See Daybooks, vol. 1, October 21, 1925, p. 132, in particular. There Weston comments, with regard to the Excusado: “It might be suspicioned that I am in a cynical mood to approach such subject matter when I might be doing beautiful women or ‘God’s out-of-doors’—or even considered that my mind holds lecherous images arising from restraint of appetite./But no! My excitement was absolute aesthetic response to form. . . . /Never did the Greeks reach a more signiﬁcant consummation to their culture. . . .” In an entry of two days later (October 23, pp. 132–33), he continues: “Elisa had only this morning polished up the bowl, though hardly in anticipation, so it shines with new glory. The household in general make sarcastic remarks re my efforts—Brett offering to sit upon it during exposure, Mercedes suggesting red roses in the bowl, while both criadas believe me quite crazy. . . .” These remarks express the same structure of sublimation as those on the reactions to his shell prints—with the household representing the unsublimated functions of things that Weston labored to transcend in his photography.

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sublimely yet sexually photographed by the Master, each one calling up the other in the eye of the mind. The local inception of this series of photographs by Weston lay in Modotti’s less masterful hands. For she made the earliest moves in this direction, beginning in 1924, with the Roses and the Calla Lily, and continuing at least into 1925, the year of Weston’s first such effort, the Excusado, with the Calla Lillies. These called on the line of figural abstraction identified, not with Stieglitz, Strand, and the “straight” photograph, but with Georgia O’Keeffe and her blown-up genital flowers, which like Weston’s single-object photographs reduced the floral still-life that had been the traditional purview of the female painter to one (or two or four) item(s), expanded to fill the entire field of the image.10 Modotti imported that contracted/expanded floral field into the smaller domain of the modernist photograph, thereby founding a fragmentary (matri)lineage that would continue with the female member of f.32, Imogen Cunningham—who, indeed, made it her signature theme—and culminate with Robert Mapplethorpe, whose single florals exploited the hermaphroditic bisexuality of the flower to express and to unstraighten the erotics of the “straight” still life photograph. It was from Modotti, then, that Weston got the idea for the close-up, frontal, view-to-the-core photograph, rather than the other way around. Yet such a chasm divides the aesthetic leanings of the two photographers that this derivation is all but unseeable. And so fragile—so far from imperious— are Modotti’s photographs that it is difficult to think of them as anything but tributary; it is almost impossible to conceive of them as originary. For they have none of the command of the full range of black-and-white that Weston’s photographs do, none of their exacting sharpness or optical purity, and none of their cold, nacreous shine. Nor, for that matter, do they contain any of Weston’s celebratory identification of the polished, streamlined object with the techno- gleam of the glossy photograph’s smooth, silvered paper, or his leveling of all materialities—soft and hard; animal, vegetable, and mineral; inorganic and organic; industrial and biological; immortal machine and perishable flesh—to that one overriding equation. And they have no claim to transcendence, either—to the photograph’s transcendence of time or the artist’s transcendence of function through form, matter through metaphysics, or the sexed body through sublimation. Modotti’s Roses is by now—and was even then—a canonical image, immediately recognizable, so often and so extravagantly admired that it hardly bears further comment.11 And it is so close to the kitsch cliché—a Hallmark

10. Like Weston, O’Keeffe reacted to the sexual, gendered readings of her ﬂowers with denials. On O’Keeffe, see Anne Middleton Wagner, “O’Keeffe’s Femininity,” Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keeffe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 29–103. 11. See Noble, “Commodity Feminism and the Reading of Roses,” Tina Modotti, pp. 28–58, for a discussion of the reputation, valuation, and high sales of Roses.

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bouquet, gather ye rosebuds, a rose by any other name, a rose is a rose—as to almost yield to it completely. But it is early enough to be inaugural and exemplary of the difference between Modotti’s and Weston’s photographic tastes, so it is worth looking at here, again. The roses that fill the full frame of the photograph are several, not one—at least four in all. Impossible to bisect them—they would only have fallen apart—they are not sliced into with the sharp knife of the eye, which is too diffuse and wandering in its attention to the photograph’s pliant field of crevices and crannies for that. So Roses offers no clear cross-section, no formal or metaphysical essence. It is, moreover, difficult to tell where one rose ends and the other begins, since their petals are so layered and lapped. Indeed, not only are the boundaries that separate them from their kin and their surroundings unclear and their identities therefore indistinct, their status as single objects is from the beginning uncertain, undermined by the petalled pluralism of each one of them. They are all surface, crease, and curl, with neither center nor singularity, no discernible structure and no contained volume—their hollows are all shallow, and every furl folds into a fissure, and vice versa, so that the distinction between interior and exterior is indeterminate as well. And the roses are all soft, poignantly past their best, the crinkled edge of each petal, registered by the camera in delicate detail, marking its fall into

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imminent decrepitude, its vulnerability to time, material decay, and the demise of fleshly things. The photograph is subtle in its vanitas meditation, but gently precise too, for together the four flowers chart different stages of the rose, from the all-but-new bud at the lower left, to the two more open blooms above, one heavier, denser, and flatter than the other, to the large, loose, overblown blossom at the lower right, on its way to ruin and all but completely undone, especially in comparison to the tighter rose adjacent to it. It is in that respect that Roses is not transcendent in its opticality: it is too devoted to the frailty and mortality of what it records, and to the very temporality that the photograph is supposed to freeze and overcome. And it is too committed to the call of the haptic—the evocation of the fleshy feel of its flowers, and the visual field’s solicitation to the fingers: the eye’s desire to touch what it sees—not in a grasping but in a stroking, groping way—and to close the gap between itself and its object, folding sensation into sense datum and back again into sensation so that while certain knowledge of the thing is lost, a kind of blind contact with it is gained.12 Roses, then, also courts the unseeing end of the spectrum of sight, and in that way as well strays from the path of mastery and sublimation soon to be laid out by Weston. This fumbling of sight into unsightedness is best exemplified by Calla Lily, undertaken in the year of Roses or a year or two thereafter. In some ways, Calla Lily is closer, in its frontal singularity, formal readability, and even its shape, its focus on the core of the flower, and its containment by the photograph, to Weston’s Nautilus Shell of a few years later. Yet each of those terms of similarity must be qualified, primarily because the depth of field of the photograph is so shallow and so much of it out of focus, and because it inhabits the middle, gray zones of the tonal scale of black-and-white photography—the area around and above what Adams would define as “zone 5” in a range from zero to ten, middle C on the photographic piano. So rather than sharp and well-defined, it is blurry and astigmatically soft—and thus its formal certitude is undermined. And rather than demonstrating its bravura technique and its mastery of the difficulties of capturing detail in the dark and light ends of the spectrum—those that must be conquered by internalizing and applying an understanding of the laws of optics and chemistry, and by deliberately contracting and expanding the tonality of the negative and print—it hugs the safe, easy center of photographic tonality, the undramatic “zone” that is arbitrarily, and in Modotti’s case hesitantly, “placed” while the rest

12. There are different kinds of haptic space that two-dimensional images can suggest. The first has to do with the contents of perspectival space, and rests on the illusion of volumes that the hand can grasp (“cubic” or sculptural space), as opposed to a purely optical surface, or retinal screen. (That is its meaning in the work of Alois Riegl, and it is synonymous with the “linear” mode in Heinrich Wölfflin’s writing.) The second, which is what I mean here, is in a sense the opposite of the first, having to do with a fascination with the materiality of a textured surface and a nonvolumetric solicitation to touch, which does not yield visual comprehension, and which in fact verges on a kind of blindness: close-up rather than distantiated, caressing rather than encompassing, somatic rather than virtual, touch at odds with sight rather than sight extending and sublimating touch.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228702320275436 by guest on 27 September 2021 “falls” accordingly. As a result, the flower is no more strongly distinguished from its ground by means of tone than it is by means of edge-definition. Its zooming in on its own core is compromised, as is its containment by the rectangle of the photograph: only the curved lapping of the upper left part of the petal against its underneath is sharp, while the dark lean of the erect stamen is fuzzy, disappearing into the vague hollow of the flower that splays out into the imprecise gray of the flower’s face and finishes in an indefinite outer contour, nearly blending with the edge of the photograph on all four sides. So while it is, like O’Keeffe’s flowers, more direct and literal about the sexuality of the form it records than any of Weston’s photographs, at the same time it renders it informe—both irresolute and somewhat amorphous, not to mention equivocal about the line of separation between the phallic and vaginal aspects of the flower. But in the end, the deliber- ation involved in the production of Calla Lily is unclear; all that is certain about it is its myopia.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228702320275436 by guest on 27 September 2021 Of the two, Calla Lilies is a more controlled, precise photograph, in that sense the more successful yield of an intentional process. It is everywhere sharp, including its background, against which the sinuous, Art Nouveau elegance of its two long stems spread out into the two vessel forms of its flowers, and then taper into curled points, the left one in particular dwindling into a linear twist traced so sharply against its ground as to suggest a trailing flourish drawn by the tip of a pen. Its black-to-white range is still narrow, but it is expertly and organically condensed in the rising of the two flowers up out of their dark stems into their pale blooms, one bright and luminous, the other more gray and dusky. And Calla Lillies is flatter and more decorative than its single sister, different from Calla Lily in its profile view and doubling of its flowers. Yet Calla Lillies explores the same terrain as Calla Lily, only more concisely. Its linear precision focuses what the Calla Lily also manages to convey for all of its out-of-focusness: the degrading of the flower’s edges, and the fading of its flesh. For where the lining up of Calla Lily’s

Modotti. Calla Lillies. 1925. Courtesy The Detroit Institute of Arts.

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tip and outer limits with the edges of its photograph makes one all the more aware of its waning, the pen-point inscription of the withering end of the left one of the two lilies sharpens that awareness into precarious form. And where the blur of the Calla Lily nevertheless evokes the crinkled infirmity of its flower and calls up other, similar sensations, such as the perfumed-crepe feel of old human skin, so that its very verging on blindness is responsible for its tactile associations and sensate memories, Calla Lillies cleaves its optically exact indexing of frailty and flaw to the equally exact rendering of the abraded materiality of the wall that forms the flat ground of the photograph. Indeed, the very grayness of Calla Lillies unites the inevitably declining materialities of flower and wall, and so imbeds the latter in the perfect smoothness of the photograph’s surface, that the one is imbricated in the other, and contradicts its (false) claims to permanence.13 What Calla Lillies ultimately focuses, then, is the ground of difference between Modotti’s and Weston’s photographies: for Weston’s optics, his technophilia and ageless essential forms, Modotti substitutes an attachment to haptic matter, susceptible to aging as well as to touch—a nearly manual rather than a purely optical field. Or rather, Modotti prefigures Weston’s high formalism with a lower materialism—one that implicates the body at every turn rather than transcending it—undergirding his superstructure with her base. For everything that Modotti yearned after in her photographs, Weston sought to overcome in his: most particularly, her photographs’ technical modesty and imperfect optics, and their clinging to flawed substance and declining matter, to things produced by and solicitous of the hand rather than the eye alone, and to a sensuous physicality never free of the poignance of its own transience. Weston would replace Modotti’s collapse of the photograph’s pallid platinum surface into the uneven, chafed texture of handworked adobe (in Calla Lily, Calla Lilies, and in other photographs) with the deep, dark, cosmic spaces surrounding his perfectly realized objective forms, their materialities transmogrified and chastened into archival silver.14 The photograph that best exemplifies, indeed emblematizes Modotti’s difference from Weston in this regard is Cloth Folds of 1924. More than that, the particular abstracting drive of Cloth Folds, in which the taut platinum surface of the

13. Since its inception the photograph has been understood to preserve what it records, and thereby prevent it from perishing: the insistence by photographers on the “archival” quality of their prints (and of certain photographic emulsions, such as platinum), is an extension of this view of photography. Yet as Roland Barthes points out in La chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard Seuil, 1980), the photograph is actually extraordinarily subject to decay; it is indeed even more unstable than other media. Modotti’s attraction to decaying, imperfect surfaces seems to suggest something more akin to the latter view of photography—namely, a notion that the photograph is caught up in the perishability of what it records, rather than transcending it. 14. It should not be inferred from this comparison that I intend a contrast between Modotti’s work in platinum and Weston’s in silver; both photographers tended to work in platinum early on and then began to switch to the silver photograph. But it is the case that Modotti seems to have continued to prefer the more delicate tonality of the platinum print, even when working in silver, while Weston’s move out of platinum and into silver corresponded to a shift in tonality toward the cooler, more dramatic black-to-white range of the silver image.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228702320275436 by guest on 27 September 2021 photograph itself seems to have slackened to produce a beige field of falling fabric, figures the discrepancy between Modotti’s work more generally and the larger tendencies of New Vision photography: her unsublimated attraction to a tactile field and the flaws within it; her preference for frangible materiality over the metallic or the adamantine, for the mutable and mortal over the immutable and immortal, and for in-between gray tones over the full black-to-white range of what would be the “zone system”; her photographs’ appeal to the hand and lack of distance from the eye; her adherence to the surface of the photograph yet unwillingness to identify that surface with pristine form, optical clarity, “previsualization,” or the technological mastery of the camera’s “glass eye.”15 In all of these ways, it couldn’t be more different from a related photograph by Weston from the same year, Circus Tent, which gives dramatic black-and-white form to the tautly stretched fabric that it represents, deemphasizing the warp and woof of that fabric in favor of the radiating lines made by its sectioning. It self-reflexively demonstrates how the photograph transforms

15. See Clement Greenberg, “The Camera’s Glass Eye,” in Newhall and Conger, Edward Weston Omnibus, pp. 87–91, for a discussion of Weston’s photography in relation to the modernist values of self-reﬂexivity and autonomy. It is Greenberg’s argument that Weston’s photographs are not properly photographic in their aspiring to those values, for in his view it is in the nature of the photograph to be outwardly referential and “anecdotal.” And indeed, the modernist ethos of the “straight” photograph, as articulated by Paul Strand, demands that it remain “objectively” true to its referent, and that that “objectivity” restrains the photograph’s capacity to function as pure subjective symbol; see Paul Strand, “Photography,” in Nathan Lyons, ed., Photographers on Photography (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966), pp. 136–37; and “The Art Motive in Photography,” in Vicki Goldberg, ed., Photography in Print (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), pp. 276–87. Weston would have concurred with this, while at the same time working to transcend it.

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matter into design, and identifies its own surface, not with manual making, but with the optical production of shape. By contrast, casting a cloth over its field of vision, Cloth Folds identifies itself with occluded sight. Indeed, it counters the very abstraction signaled by its other title, Texture and Shadow, since its adherence to material stands in the way of the dematerializing drive of optical abstraction, and refutes the photograph’s claims to the latter by insisting upon its field of literal detail and its indexical production.16 Is it too much to suggest, finally, that Cloth Folds also calls to mind Freud’s dictum that the only thing ever invented by woman was weaving?17

Simile, Metaphor, Metonymy: Something Other Than Equivalents

One of the prime concepts that paved the path out of the Pictorialist and into the modernist model of the art photograph was that of the “equivalent,” espoused by Stieglitz and implicated in the expressionism of the straight photograph, from Strand to Weston, Minor White, Adams, and beyond. In the logic of the equivalent, the meaning of a photograph is twisted out of the grip of its referent—cloud or horse groin or body part, shell or toilet or vegetable—and given over to the photograph’s formal content, the sentiments of the subject who authored it, and the corresponding emotions of the viewer who sees it.18 In this way, the photograph is induced to transform its metonymical reframing of the world it represents with a metaphoric ﬁguring of its author’s soul: a picture of a shell becomes not the shell that it records set in a new context, but a shape that is metaphorically linked, either to sex, the ﬁne feelings of the photographer, or the metamorphosis of one into the other; while a picture of a urinal becomes the

16. On the index versus the icon, see Charles S. Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” in Justus Buchler, ed., The Philosophy of Peirce: Selected Writings (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), pp. 98–119; Roman Jakobson, “Quest for the Essence of Language” (1965), in Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, eds., Language in Literature (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1987), pp. 413–27; and Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index,” The Originality of the Avant- Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 196–219. 17. See Sigmund Freud, “Femininity,” in James Strachey, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 23: New Introductory Works on Psychoanalysis and Other Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), p. 132: “It seems that women have made few contributions to the the discoveries and inventions in the history of civilization; there is, however, one technique which they may have invented—that of plaiting and weaving.” (Freud goes on to give this self-admittedly “fantastic” explanation for the phenomenon: “Nature herself would seem to have given the model which this achievement imitates by causing the growth at maturity of the pubic hair that conceals the genitals. The step that remained to be taken lay in making the threads adhere to one another, while on the body they stick into the skin and are only matted together.” Thus he characteristically elides the cultural reasons for his assertion, reafﬁrms the Nature-bound status of Woman, and offers an argument about limited female creativity that replaces the sublimation of the great masculine arts with a structure more akin to repression, fetishism, and sexual suppression. At the same time he draws a link between this “feminine” accomplishment and the female body, between textile and corporeality.) 18. See Daniell Cornell, Alfred Stieglitz and the Equivalent: Reinventing the Nature of Photography (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1999). On Stieglitz and the equivalent, see also Rosalind Krauss, “Stieglitz/Equivalents,” October 11 (Winter 1979), pp. 129–40; and Allan Sekula, “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,” in Goldberg, Photography in Print, pp. 452–73.

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Victory of Samothrace, metaphorically tied to transcendence of “lecherous” proclivi- ties and their conversion into the pure passion of photography itself.19 (There is a certain tautology in all of this: the form of the modernist photograph is a symbol of the author’s feeling for form, and of its own formalism, or rather, its ability to make its indexicality over into formalism.) Weston’s articulation of the structure of sublimation in his “Daybooks” commentary on the reactions to his photographs and his feelings about them is a perfect expression of the reasoning of the equivalent. But Weston’s photographs are simpler in their symbolism than his words suggest—certainly they are simpler than Stieglitz’s “equivalents”—and suggest something even more akin to simile than to metaphor. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (1971 edition), a metaphor is a complex “figure of speech in which a name or descriptive term is transferred to some object different, but anal- ogous to, that to which it is properly applicable”; it is “not literal, figurative,” and older definitions of it suggest that it involves “an alteration of a word from the proper and natural meaning to that which is not proper, and yet agrees with it by some likeness which appears to be in it.” A simile, by contrast, is simply “a comparison of one thing with another,” involving “likeness, resemblance, similarity.” A metaphor is preeminently linguistic, it is predicated on the symbolic, arbitrary operations of language, and some would argue that it is applied with much more difficulty to the photograph, with its indexical properties, than to painting, for example, whose iconic status involves an at least partly arbitrary relation to the referent. A simile, on the other hand, circles around empirical comparisons between similar looking objects whose resemblance to one another has subjective implications but is founded on an objective likeness. Where the metaphor works with verbs as well as nouns, can be adjectival and adverbial, and constructs figures around whole sentences if not paragraphs and parables, the simile involves mainly nouns. And where the metaphor never directly states the “likeness” that it constructs (which is and isn’t “in it”: it does and does not exist in the objects alluded to), and is entangled in a mercurial slippage between figures, properties, and actions, between signifiers and signifieds, words and referents, in which that which is “natural and proper” to a sign alters into that which is not—one thing is another—

19. On metonymy and metaphor, see Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1956), pp. 70–96; cited and summarized in Cornell, Alfred Stieglitz and the Equivalent, p. 9: “A metaphor relies on substitutions of comparative relationships, whereas a metonymy relies on substitutions of contiguous relationships. Said another way, metaphors transform an object’s meaning without changing its context. . . . Metonymy, on the other hand, transforms an object’s meaning by indicating a different but related context.” (See also Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in Pomorska and Rudy, Language in Literature, pp. 95–114, in particular, “V. The Metaphoric and the Metonymic Poles,” pp. 109–14.) It may be claimed that photography is by nature ﬁrst and foremost metonymic in its “substitutions,” for it depends upon an original contiguity with its referents, and produces new meanings for its objects precisely by giving them new contexts—in other words, that there is an integral relationship between the indexicality of the photograph, its cutting out of the world, and its metonymic operations. It is also the claim of this essay that metaphor slides into metonymy in a way that the simile does not.

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the simile always says “like” and never threatens to change anything into anything else: a cloud is like a sand dune is like a woman’s haunch is like a bedpan is like a shell is like a uterus is like a urinal is like a classical sculpture is like a beautiful woman, and so on back around again. But in the structure of the simile those objects never turn into anything other than themselves—they must always remain the same as themselves in order to be similar to that which they resemble: so while it may be like a body in the throes of ecstasy, a shell is still clearly a shell, in a photograph by Weston.20 And a rose is a rose. Or is it? Is Modotti’s Roses a simile, or a metaphor? And when Gertrude Stein wrote those famous words in the decade before Modotti turned to photography, did she mean to refute the power of the metaphor to alter things and transfer meanings—the power of the rose to be something else—or did she mean to underline the altering and transferring capacities of the metaphor, to oscillate between embracing and negating them, to stress and at the same time destabilize the separation between language and its world of referents, between the word rose that changes and the thing rose that does not? Or did she mean to suggest, through negation and reiteration, that indeed there is some sort of association between the subjective changeability of the word, as the signifier is uttered in the mouth and the signified resonates in the mind and memory, and the temporal, corporeal changeability of the object in the world, which in fact never stays the same as its name? I suspect, from the context of Stein’s poetry, which explores the physicality as much as the conventionality of language, the interaction between sense and sign, the interplay between the literal and the imaginative, that the answer is all of the above.21 As for Modotti’s Roses and other photographs, the answer is inflected by the fact that they are photographs, not poems (and not paintings either), and by the fact that they are different kinds of photographs from Weston’s simile-driven

20. It is otherwise, for example, in contemporary work by the Surrealists, some of which is remarkably close to Weston’s in its forms—see Man Ray’s work in particular—but which uses the properties of the photographic medium to turn one object into another. See Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde, pp. 87–118; and “Corpus Delecti,” in Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art; New York: Abbeville Press, 1985), pp. 57–100. This constitutes one of the fundamental differences between Weston’s photography and European work that coincides with and superficially resembles it—in addition to Surrealist work, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (particularly as photographed by Stieglitz) comes to mind in relation to Weston’s Excusado, as does Lázsló Moholy- Nagy’s appropriated shell X-rays and nebula in his 1925 Bauhaus book, Painting Photography Film, in relation to Weston’s Nautilus Shell of 1927. 21. The context of Stein’s famous phrase, “rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” is the erotic poem “Lifting Belly” (1915–17), in Richard Kostelanetz, ed., The Yale Gertrude Stein (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 4–54; see p. 35 in particular. In the context of the poem, where a rose is not only a rose, the phrase “rose is a rose . . . ” works both to negate and reaffirm the operations of metaphor, both with and against the grain of its own literalist assertion, while also setting the linguistic figure of the rose, as well as its crossing out, against the somatic ground of the body. See also Catharine R. Stimpson, “The Somagrams of Gertrude Stein,” in Susan R. Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 30–43.

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equivalents for his art-sublimated ardor. Certainly, the labial field of Roses suggests the vulva, as much by a history of feminine association as simple resemblance. And the Lilies have their phallic, vaginal, and uterine resonances, though in that case there is a literal, if mixed-up, relationship between the double sexing of the flower and its evocation of human sexuality. And Modotti was interested in the metaphoric status of other things that she photographed, such as the “witch’s claw” of the 1925 El Manito, altering desert plant into hag’s talon by photographic agency.22 Later she would be even more directly symbolic, as in her photographs of hammers, sickles, and sombreros; bandolier, corn, and guitar. But Modotti established no chain of like but unchanging forms, as Weston did, and was much more often given to the functional status of the things she recorded—a vessel is just that, in a photograph of 1926 of a woman carrying an olla; moreover, its “femininity” is established, not by the Surrealist device of turning a woman into a spoon and a spoon into a woman, but by plain use and physical contiguity. Indeed, Modotti tended to emphasize the metonymic relationship, not only between photographs and the world they record, but also between objects within any given photograph—the olla is carried by and sits on the shoulder of a woman rather than looking like her or becoming a figure for her; a woman is a vessel by literally being one—by carrying one baby inside a patently pregnant belly and another under her arm and on her hip, and so on. There is one photograph by Modotti, from her 1924 series of interior views of the convent at Tepotzatlán, that has a kind of metaphoric potentiality to it: Interior of a Church.23 At least, its effect on me has always been to evoke the creases of a bodily juncture, like that of a groin or armpit, although it is not quite as specific a resemblance as that. Comparison with a photograph by Weston of just such a meeting between female chest and arm can serve to illustrate what I mean, while at the same time pointing to the absurdity of the proposition, “church-vault is like armpit” when applied to Modotti’s photograph, and underlining again the critical difference between her photography and Weston’s. For what I would argue here is that Modotti’s photography eschews the simile and shuttles unstably between metaphor and metonymy, depending on a phenomenological relay between subject and object and inducing an empathetic, mnemonic interplay between the physicality of the body and the corporeality of the world. Meanwhile,

22. Weston called it “witch’s claw,” while Modotti called their maid Elisa’s hands “witch’s claws”—see Lowe, Tina Modotti, Photographs, pp. 24, 28. 23. The series of photographs of Tepotzatlán to which Interior of a Church belongs led into Modotti’s involvement in the Mexican Renaissance, as among other things a documenter of indigenous Mexican art and then of the Mexican muralists, and as a photographer for Mexican Folkways and El Machete—see Lowe, Tina Modotti, Photographs, pp. 25ff. A photograph of the inside of a tower at Tepotzatlán, Interior of a Church was also an experimental photograph that Weston reluctantly admired: it was produced with an enlarged positive from which a negative print was made, and then mounted upside-down, thus testifying to Modotti’s interest in inversion and suggesting that for her the photograph was a play on abstraction more than a simple document. (See Lowe, Tina Modotti, Photographs, p. 24.)

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228702320275436 by guest on 27 September 2021 Modotti. Interior of a Church. 1924. Courtesy Page Imageworks: Tony and Merrily Page. it lays a contradictory materiality over and under the opticality of the modernist photograph, in such a way as to shift and undermine the workings of the equivalent. Interior of a Church evokes the interiority of the body by being an interior, and calling up the inhabitation of other interiors by one’s own body, making one remember the touch if not smell of damp, thick old walls, and indeed the resonance of the spaces they create. From there it is a short step to making the association with the reﬂexive feel of one’s own ﬂesh, and the humid contact of the body with itself. Yes, one may note the visual resemblance between the complex groining of the wall where it meets and slides into the ceiling, the crotch-effect of the corner and its adobe craquelure in Modotti’s image on the one hand, and on the other the underarm and its bodily hair as it meets the side of the torso in Weston’s photograph. There, of course, it is the breast that is the object of the picture, its carnality and genital association at once enhanced by its framing by underarm hair and transcended by its cropping into shape and texture and its luminous decontextualization, though its identity as what it is—a breast—is never relin- quinshed; it is clearly punctuated by the nipple. (The bit of light entering the hole in Modotti’s vaulted nook, marking its inversion of volume, makes it something like a negative of Weston’s image.) One might be tempted to say that Modotti’s photograph uses its architecture to invoke a Cubist abstraction, all convex and

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concave angles, of the body that Weston represents so often. But in the end it is not so much that Interior of a Church visually resembles an underarm (such a direct likeness would not come to mind, I think, without the photograph by Weston, which was made a decade later than Modotti’s) as that it summons the body up by other than strictly visual means. Perhaps it gives pictorial expression to a verbal term such as that of the “groin vault.” But again, it does so by conjuring the body’s contiguity with close corners, its adjacency to rough walls, its contact with uneven ﬂoors and proximity to low ceilings: it images vicinity rather than producing visual similitude. And rather than belonging to a chain of photographic simili- tudes, as do Weston’s photographs, it calls upon a narrower, contiguous series of images of heavy adobe interiors from the Church at Tepotzatlán, including arches, tiled floors, stairways, and cracked, degraded walls, as well as other wooden doors and Modotti’s well-known depiction of a wooden staircase. Finally, of all the photographs by Modotti discussed so far, it is one that is the most insistent about the haptic materiality of the groined forms that it represents, again underwriting its modernist commitment to abstract visualization with a base attraction to matter, its devotion to the disembodied camera eye with a root incli- nation toward manual facture.24

24. On the subject of modernism’s own unconscious pulsation toward and against materiality, see Briony Fer, On Abstract Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 1997.

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Some fifty years later a young American woman working in Rome, Francesca Woodman, would spell out some of what is implicit in Modotti’s photography. In her Roman photograph of a kneeling female body cornered behind an old wall with a calla lily propped up against it, she brings together several of the components found in Modotti’s work. As if seeking to enunciate the femininity of interiors and flowers and to literalize old metaphors for the feminine—the interior, the flower (and elsewhere the shell)—she lays them side by side, for comparison perhaps, but also to make plain the importance of contiguity, indeed to see what happens when metaphoric connections are inflected and contaminated by the relations of metonymy. Throughout her work Woodman, too, was drawn to worn walls and decayed interiors, but in almost all of her photographs the connection to the female body is explicit, because the female body is shown lying against those surfaces and inhabiting those interiors. In this photograph in particular, the lower part of the female torso comes in physical contact with the ground—a nicked, jointed tile surface slanting up to meet the upper edge of the photograph in deep shadow (where the vulval shape of the inverted sleeve of a cast-off garment is dimly seen), sloping down to join the dirty lower, and everywhere the left edge of the image, and in general eliding the distinction between surface and depth— and then is half blocked by the sharp edge of a scraped and pitted wall whose ver- tical surface takes up most of the right side of the photograph and lines up with the full right edge of it, while joining indeterminately with the floor toward the middle of the bottom edge, and dividing the photograph in two. Thus the shadowy groin of the torso is tied, not only to the shadows of the interior space, the inside-out folds of a frock, and the inner recesses of the lily folded in on itself (with its phallic stamen disappearing into it just as the blur of the hand above vanishes onanistically into the body of which it is part), but also to the interiorized groining of wall and floor, and of the photograph. Thus the female body’s touching of itself is contiguously tied to its touching of the floor, the floor’s meeting with the wall, the flower’s lying against its surface, and its stretching to the limits of the photograph and the “blind field” beyond.25 And thus the old ascription of surface and interiority, invisibility, mercuriality, and of course untranscended carnality as contradictory but related properties of the “feminine” is here tested photographically.26

25. See Barthes on the “champ aveugle” of the photograph—that which is just outside the frame of the photograph, invisible in it yet determining of it, and according to Barthes crucial to the erotics of the photograph—La chambre claire, p. 91. 26. For a catalogue of “feminine” metaphors, see Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989): “Dreams, Fears, Idols,” pp. 139–98. On Woodman, see Rosalind Krauss, “Francesca Woodman: Problem Sets,” Bachelors (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, October Books, 1999), pp. 161–77; Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Just Like a Woman,” Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 238–55; and Margaret Sundell, “Vanishing Point: The Photography of Francesca Woodman,” in Catherine de Zegher, ed., Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine (Boston, Cambridge, and London: Institute of Contemporary Art/MIT Press, 1996), pp. 435–39.

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Perhaps Woodman’s photograph represents, within its frame, the conversion of the metaphor into the simile by metonymic means—the female body is like a sleeve, like a lily, and like an interior space because they share that space: there they are, side by side, you can see for yourself. (Only occasionally did Weston make his likened forms contiguous by having them inhabit the same photographic space—a shell cradled in a concave fold of beach rock, a female pubis set against the begin- nings of a cave on another beach, a female body sprawled on dunes of desert sand. More usually, his forms evoke each other across photographs.) But Woodman’s photograph also shows the discrepancy of metaphor and simile, and their difference from metonymy: for once it is converted into a contiguous likeness. The metaphoric femininity of the lily, for instance, is too obvious and literal (as well as too outright and too conﬂicted in its phallicism) to continue working its old evocative magic. Meanwhile the contiguity of young body with old wall marks a divide between likeness and physical nearness, similitude and inhabitation. Modotti, who was young too when she made her photographs of old walls, spelled out none of the metaphoric similarities between contiguous things that Woodman’s photograph does. What she did do was to bring the equivalent back to earth, materialize its dematerialized forms in the evocation of physical, not spiritual, feelings, make its resonances those of the body rather than the disembodied intellect, and ultimately refute its refutation of the metonymic, indexical condition of the photograph, by contradicting its purely optical status, its manufacture by the eye alone, its formal delectation and symbolic coding by the eye of the mind.27

27. Indeed, Weston’s and Modotti’s photographies may be understood as proposing two contrary self-deﬁnitions of the photographic medium: as optical on the one hand, and indexical on the other. On the question of modernism’s different medium self-definitions, see again Krauss, “Equivalents/Stieglitz.”

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Occupation, Housewife

Occupation, Housewife: so Tina Modotti’s profession was described on her death certificate in 1942. Neither actress, model, photographer, nor political activist, all of which were her occupations at one time and another, but “housewife.”28 We have cause to doubt that Modotti would have identified herself as such. Yet there are photographs from the year of Weston’s shell photographs that do suggest a certain identification with the domestic work of the criada, such as Hands Washing (Labor I), and more generally, with the physical labor of the female worker, as in Hands Resting on a Tool. (It is tempting to read the hands in Hands Resting on a Tool as male hands, in binary contrast to those depicted in Hands Washing, which seem self-evidently female because of the work they perform, and thus to understand Modotti as engaging in a photographic analysis of labor as at once classed

28. See Lowe, Tina Modotti, Photographs, p. 46. Modotti died in Mexico in 1942, three years after returning there, following her political imprisonment in 1929, and her subsequent exile to Berlin, Moscow, Paris, and Spain.

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and gendered, as she did in her marionette series. But closer inspection of the blurred background of cloth in Hands Resting on a Tool suggests a Mexican woman’s belt-seamed and pleated shift, and leads to another possible understanding of the hands themselves, which against that ground and under their caked and creased dirt begin to read as the slender, relatively hairless hands of a woman, while their restful pose, despite the apparent masculinity of the tool they hold, begins to be coded as “feminine.” Or perhaps one might understand the resting upper hand as “feminine” and the ﬁsted, thickened lower hand as “masculine”? All of which still suggests an analysis of labor as at once classed and gendered.) Certainly the washing hands remind one of the remarks recorded by Weston in 1925 concerning the housemaid toil of cleaning and polishing the bathroom to ready it for use and aesthetic transformation, and in general the function of his household to support and stand for the unsublimated ground— shopping, buying, eating, rotting, cleaning, using, housekeeping—on which he performed his work of sublimation: the back of domestic labor on which the work of art is built.

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In the year prior to the making of the Excusado—the point where Weston’s series of similes really began—Weston made a photograph of Modotti’s hands, folded against her kimonoed stomach. Cropped so that only the line of the hands against the patterned field of the kimono is seen, this photograph belongs to the moment when Weston was still somewhat in the sway of his earlier Pictorialism— the softened hands and the kimono suggest that influence, if the close, flattened cropping of the photograph does not. Hands, Mexico belongs to a set of images in which the kimono is used, like a theater curtain, to enframe and isolate parts of Modotti’s body and begin the work of transforming her body and Weston’s photography into modernist icons. It also references Stieglitz’s serial “Portrait” of O’Keeffe, particularly his series of photographs of her hands, resting, sewing, moving like birds in flight, posed against her body or pulling her shift apart and thus index-

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ing her model’s performance, situated in relation to her own art work and sometimes in relation to an automobile wheel, a symbol of modernity commensurate with the camera. If Stieglitz’s “Portrait” of O’Keeffe limits the dematerialization and vertiginous abstraction of the equivalent in its attachment to always-recognizable and discernibly oriented body parts—face, neck, and chin, breast, stomach, and thighs—his photographs of her hands come closest to the disorientation and subjective expressionism of the cloud series.29 Weston, for his part, would not often pay attention to hands—they were not, it would appear, a favorite female body part—but he did learn the lesson of the bodily equivalent from Stieglitz’s “Portrait” and applied it more extensively to the many bodies he recorded than Stieglitz did, dividing up the bodies of all of his mistresses, beginning with Tina, into heads, breasts, buttocks, thighs, legs, and feet, some more disoriented than others (such as the photograph of the breast discussed in the previous section), but all of them cropped so as to isolate the body part from its larger context, and all of them mediating between the expressionist formalism of the equivalent and the referential literalism of the sharply focused “straight” photograph. Modotti posed for Hands, Mexico when she was beginning to make the photographs discussed in this essay. I wonder if she thought of it when she made her own photographs of hands three years later. Perhaps she did, perhaps she didn’t, but her awareness of the aesthetic significance of photographed hands seems undeniable. And the resemblance between Hands Resting on a Tool and Hands, Mexico is remarkable: as if Modotti had taken the aestheticized fragment of the hands, exoticized by both their title and the Japoniste field against which they are set, substituted plain cotton for decorative fabric and masculinized workaday hands for the lady’s long, feminine, do-nothing fingers, inverted the hands’ relationship to one another and to the coordinates of the photograph, given them a tool to hold rather than merely resting them against the body and each other, and thereby brought the visual field of aestheticism back down to the ground of manual labor. Hands Washing resembles Hands, Mexico much less; nevertheless, it is pointed in its debasement of the Stieglitzian bodily equivalent, inverting the usual relationship between dark field and light fingers into dark scrubbing knuckles and white scrubbing rag, bringing the body low and the verti- cal field of the photograph down to the literal ground of the floor that is being soaped and scrubbed, and effectively crossing out the expressionist elegance of the hand photograph with the manual mark of domestic drudgery. Both sets of hands, that is, work as desublimatory gestures, emblems of a larger project of dragging the modernist photograph down from its function as a high expression of artistic spirit to the material realm of the body. Both photographs speak to a field of contiguity between hands, tools, and materials, a realm of physical relations between body and world that goes beyond the frame of either image—rather than the purely optical relation between the body and itself functioning as the sign of

29. See Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1978).

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the formalist photograph’s internal relation to itself, as in Hands, Mexico. And both pairs of hands inscribe their photographic devotion to the counterterrain of the haptic.30 That devotion is emblematized in a photograph belonging to a series of images of Mexican peasant mothers with their infants from around the same time as Hands Washing and Hands Resting on a Tool. In Baby Nursing, the cheek and forehead of a female infant rhymes in reverse with the contour of the breast that it nurses, while its palpating hand makes flesh-to-flesh contact, and a differentiated field of fabric (plain cotton, dotted baby’s dress, woven flax) at once frames and isolates body parts (breast, hand, cheek, ear, hair) and focuses the contact between them, while underlining their closeness and reinforcing their sheer physicality. This physicality is communicated through the stretched, pendant volume of the milk-distended breast, the sucking, wide-open mouth felt rather than seen, the pudgy creases and white nails of the dark infant hand, the eyelash of the half-open eye, the fine hair lying against the cheek in front of the ear and implying the nape of the neck behind it, the intricate coiling and crevicing of the ear itself, the piercing of its lobe by the sharp metallic curve of the earring, not to mention the cuff that makes contact with the wrist, the cloth that makes contact with the breast on all sides, and the warp and woof of the material that supports the weight of the child’s head from behind and beneath, again not so much seen as felt, and implied beyond the limits of the photograph. More than any other image by Modotti, Baby Nursing condenses the conversion of the sublimated formalist field of the photograph into a tactile, materialist, corporeal one, the shifting of form into tact, the distanced optics of formal expression into the boundary-crossing haptics of empathetic physical feeling, zeroing in on the short-circuited relay between touching, groping hand and close-seeing, short-sighted eye that informs the rest of her photography. And it does so against a bodily ground that can only be described as inescapably, “essentially” feminine, or female.

Coda: Femininity in the Field of Vision

In their classed subject-matter, Hands Washing and Hands Resting on a Tool (what we might call Labor I and II) suggest the politics that inform Modotti’s formal strategies; they propose a connection between her Marxism and her desublimated formalism. At the same time, Modotti’s photographs predict some of the stances of later feminism with regard to the image: Baby Nursing, in particular, speaks to the gendering of her project. Well after the fact of these photographs, a “female gaze” has been theorized in contrast to the so-called “male gaze” of cinematic culture, with its gendering of the subject and object of the look as male and female, respectively; its binary opposition between the positions of masculine identiﬁcation and feminine

30. On hands and the haptic in Modotti’s photography, see Noble, Tina Modotti, in particular pp. 67–74. There are many points of convergence between my essay and Noble’s recent book on Modotti, but ultimately they serve rather different arguments about Modotti’s photography.

otherness; its triangulation of voyeuristic camera, narrative protagonist, and fetishized female body; its phallic optics of possession and sublimation.31 That “female gaze” is characterized, always in relation to the “male gaze,” as follows: as a crossing of the positions of identification and otherness by way of the empathetic closing of distance between the subject and object of the gaze; and instead of the triangulation of camera, protagonist, and body, a collapse of camera and body, an identification with the film screen or photographic surface rather than either a protagonist or the camera, and a substitution of a liminal, haptic space for the technique of optical distantiation.32

31. For the classic description of the “male gaze,” see Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 14–26. See also E. Ann Kaplan, “Is the Gaze Male?,” Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (New York and London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 23–35. (Mulvey never uses the phrase “the male gaze,” though she does speak of the “male unconscious” and the “gaze of man.”) 32. On the possibility of a “female gaze,” see Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,” in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy, eds., Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 4th ed. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 758–72. See also Lindsay Smith, “The Politics of Focus: Feminism and Photography Theory,” in Isobel Armstrong, ed., New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 238–62.

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At a moment prior to their theorization, none of these characteristics would have been conscious feminist strategies. But they might flow from the cultural positioning and psychological constitution of the female subject, and from her double consciousness of herself as simultaneously a subject and an object, mentally before the camera as well as behind it, at once in possession of and a part of a field of vision that she is less likely to understand as hers alone.33 And they are the characteristics of Modotti’s photography: such is the field of vision, her photographs seem to suggest, of the master’s model, used to lying prone on the ground, indissociable from her body and the surfaces with which it comes in contact. It is also the field of vision of those assigned to the artist’s household, such as Modotti herself once again, for whom artistic sublimation is always cut with the everyday chores that both support and undermine it, pulling away at it like undertow. But more than anything else, Modotti’s photographs recommend a feminist reading along the lines proposed by Luce Irigaray: a “photography which is not one” that corresponds to her “sex which is not one.” The outline of that “sex,” as Irigaray gives it, is as follows: the “negative, the underside, the reverse” of what she calls “phallomorphism”; a “defect in this [phallomorphic] systematics of representation . . . in its scoptophilic lens”; an “autoeroticism” constituted by the fact that “Woman ‘touches herself’ all the time”—by the “contact of at least two (lips) which keeps woman in touch with herself, but without any possibility of distinguishing what is touching from what is touched”; “the ‘thickness’ of that ‘form,’ the layering of its volume”; a sexuality, “always at least double . . . it is plural”; in short, “a different economy,” “determined by friction,” attracted to “blurring,” the “inside/outside” of “the economy of desire marked by idealism.”34 Like the “female gaze” in relation to the “male gaze,” Irigaray’s “different economy” is by definition constituted in relation to the idealist “one of form,” “the predominance of the visual, and of the discrimination and individualization of form” that describes “phallomorphism.”35 And as much as it can be and has been characterized as an essentialist formulation, defining female sexuality according to the physical, Nature-given attributes of the female sex organ(s), seemingly reducing Woman to her genital essence, the “two (lips)” of her vagina, and differentiating her accordingly, Irigaray’s “sex which is not one” must also be understood as a strategic intervention in the mainstream, “phallogocentric” construction of the human subject and psyche, as well as in Western metaphysics and aesthetics, which is to say in Western idealism and formalism.36

33. An objection can be raised that all subjects are so constituted—see Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 1–8. The answer to that objection would be that the female subject is trained by her culture in the view that that split subjectivity is her gendered lot, not to be transcended, uniﬁed, or subjected to the illusion of command. 34. See Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 26, 24, 27, 28, 29, 112, 111, 110. 35. Ibid., pp. 25–26. 36. On the question of feminist essentialism, see Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989).

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The same may be said of Modotti’s photography, on all counts. Indeed, Irigaray’s characterization of the “sex which is not one” may be converted into a description of Modotti’s photography, by substituting “photography” for “sex,” and applying the terms of that “sex” to Modotti’s photographs: which represent the “negative, the underside, the reverse” of Weston’s sublimated “phallomorphism,” the “defect” in his “scoptophilic lens”; which are marked in their tactility, and in the difficulty of “distinguishing what is touching from what is touched” in the tactile fields to which they are drawn (as in Cloth Folds, Interior of a Church, and Baby Nursing); which are characterized by “thickness” and “layering” (as in the Roses); which show a devotion to the double and the plural (as in Calla Lillies and again Roses) rather than “the one of form”; which are, in short, “determined by friction,” given to “blurring” (as in Calla Lily), and suggestive of the “inside/outside” of Weston’s idealist “economy of desire.” As these remarks already suggest, the “different economy” of Modotti’s photographs must also be understood in relation to Weston’s, as an intervention in the photographic aesthetics that he articulated so masterfully:37 in short, a counterformalism to oppose his formalism, with its “predominance of the visual, and of the discrimination and individualization of form,” a haptics to contravene his optics. Nothing, however, suggests that Modotti’s “different economy” was a conscious strategy of sabotage; in that it is unlike Irigaray’s later formulation of the “sex which is not one,” which, in the context of the 1970s women’s movement, describes a feminist project of deliberate subversion at the level of the psychoanalytic and philosophical discourses to which she addressed herself. Instead, Modotti’s “photography which is not one” would have to be understood in terms of contrary aesthetic leanings, unconscious resistance, a visual dialogism that remained untheorized and indeed largely unverbalized. And again, though it is no more inevitable in the female photographer than the “female gaze” articulated above—it is descriptive of Modotti’s photography, but not of Imogen Cunningham’s, for instance—if one were seeking an explanation for it, it would have to be according to the different psychic formation and culturation of the female subject, rather than the biological givens of her body. Which nevertheless comes very close to an essentialist line of argument about the femininity, or femaleness, of Modotti’s field of vision, just as Irigaray’s attempt to revise discursive formations is redolent of an essentialist rhetoric about sexual difference. And just as Irigaray’s central image—the sex which is not one—expresses the definitional instability at the heart of the “feminine” as well as the unclear

37. This is the view of the “defects” that constitute Modotti’s work that I prefer—to another account which suggests itself: that Modotti’s photography testiﬁes to a lesser mastery, a failure of quality control, an absence of genius, and a lack of access to the psychic formation necessary for “greatness”; on this question, see Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” Women, Art and Power, and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), pp. 145–78. Likewise, Irigaray substitutes her formulation of the “sex which is not one” for the psychoanalytic/feminist construct of “lack,” with which she herself begins.

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boundary between the “feminine” and the “female,” and slips from linguistic pun into fixed bodily referent and back again, occupying the gray area between the literal and the metaphoric that characterizes Hélène Cixous’s “writing with white ink” too.38 Asked about the consequences of her ideas for “‘science’ and psychoanalytic practice,” Irigaray herself had something elusive to say about the problem: And if anyone objects that the question, put this way, relies too heavily on metaphors, it is easy to reply that the question in fact impugns the privilege granted to metaphor (a quasi solid) over metonymy (which is much more closely allied to fluids). Or—suspending the status of truth accorded to these essentially metalinguistic “categories” and “dichoto- mous oppositions”—to reply that in any event all language is (also) metaphorical, and that, by denying this, language fails to recognize the “subject” of the unconscious and precludes inquiry into the subjection, still in force, of that subject to a symbolization that grants precedence to solids.39 Wishing to defend against the charge of metaphoricity, Irigaray paradoxically uses metaphor—here “solids” and “fluids”—to assert the primacy and subversive potential of metonymy, while questioning the division between the two terms that she herself uses (a division that she seems to suggest is too “solid”), emphasizing the inescapable metaphoricity of language, form, and subjectivity, and returning to the mainstream predominance of one of her two metaphors, in order to topple it into the other. This is reminiscent of the sliding of metaphor into metonymy of Modotti’s photography, its inhabiting of the dim region between the optical and haptical, form and touch, the iconic and the indexical (or to use Irigaray’s terms, between the solidity of metaphoric figures and the fluidity of metonymic relations). It is also evocative of what seems to be the irrevocable eliding of femininity into femaleness, of culturally assigned attributes into biological sex that characterizes definitions of the “feminine” and the “female,” in both patriarchal and feminist discourse. One need look only to dictionary definitions to see this at work. For “female,” the O.E.D. gives the following definitions: Belonging to the sex which bears offspring. . . . Of the parts of a plant: Fruit-bearing. . . . Of a blossom or flower: having a pistil and no stamens . . . . Composed or consisting of women, or of female animals or plants. . . . A distinctive term for that part of an instrument or contrivance which is adapted to receive the corresponding or male part.

38. See Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, New French Feminisms: An Anthology (New York: Schocken Books), pp. 245–64: “There is always within her a little of that good mother’s milk. She writes in white ink” (p. 251). 39. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, pp. 109–10, my emphasis.

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For “feminine,” it gives the following: Belonging to the female sex; female . . . of objects to which sex is attrib- uted, or which have female names. . . . Or of pertaining to a woman, or to women; consisting of women; carried on by women. . . . Characteristic of, peculiar or proper to women; womanlike or womanly . . . . Depreciatively: Womanish, effeminate. . . . Of the gender to which appellations of females belong. . . . The adjective used absolutedly: She that is, or they that are, feminine. . . . The feminine element in human nature. . . . A person, rarely an animal, that is feminine, a female, a woman. . . . A word of the feminine gender. . . . (To that, one may add all the variance in the qualities associated with femininity and femaleness, which range from culture to nature, from the “pretty in pink” assigned to girl babies and girls’ toys to the blue that used to be feminine, from the diminutive to the devouring, from the soft and ladylike, the ethereal and the unsexed, to the medusal, the animalistic, the unsublimated and sex itself.) Revealing about the circularity of thought inscribed in the words we use for sex and gender, these definitions are notable for their lability, their hovering between the biological and the linguistic, corporeal inherence and evaluative adjective, essence and supplement, with “female” weighted toward the former and “feminine” toward the latter. But the “feminine” is particularly fluid, as slippery as metaphor itself in its movement from the one into the other and back again.40 As for the “femininity” of Modotti’s field of vision, what I offer here is a description, not an explanation, and it pertains to the optional, ascribed “femininity” of one aesthetic in relation to the chosen, imputed “masculinity” of another, rather more than the femaleness of one artist versus the maleness of the other—though Modotti’s discretionary “femininity” is not so clearly separable from the perforce fact of her having been female, any more than Weston’s elective “masculinity” is detachable from the unchosen fact of his having been male. Or any more than the hapto-philia, the destructible, almost-tangible materiality and the fragile gray zone of Modotti’s photographs are divisible from the pistillate, petiole, child-bearing, and houseworking iconicity of the vegetal and corporeal referents to which they are indexically bound. And just as it may be one of the fortunes of feminism, sometimes even at its most deconstructive—think of Simone de Beauvoir’s natural-history eloquence on the subject of the sexual variety of the plant and animal kingdoms, or Judith Butler’s voyage deep into the heart of chromoso- mal difference41—to never utterly sever culture from biology, or disentangle gender from sex, so it is the contribution of Modotti’s “photography which is not one” to insist on the blurring of the line between the metaphoric and the

40. That slipperiness characterizes Freud’s essay on “Femininity,” for instance. 41. See Beauvoir, “The Data of Biology,” The Second Sex, pp. 3–37; and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 106–111.

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metonymic, the iconic and the indexical, optical figure and haptical “blind field” ingrained in her medium, yet against its grain too. And thereby to question the transcendence of the New Vision’s “one of form”: to propose, from a “feminine” point of view, something else other and more regressive than modernism’s monotheistic monopoly of the self-definition of photography as an avant-garde optics.

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