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Mapplethorpe, Schor, and Sherman

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Mapplethorpe, Schor, and Sherman 2 Developing the negative: Mapplethorpe, Schor, and Sherman [C]onfronted with the photograph, as in the dream, it is the same effort, the same Sisyphean labor: to reascend, straining toward the essence, to climb back down without having seen it, and to begin all over again. (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: 66) [T]he relation between the gaze and what one wishes to see involves a lure. The subject is presented as other than he is, and what one shows him is not what he wants to see. It is in this way that the eye may function as objet a, that is to say, at the level of the lack. (Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts: 104) Barthes’ Camera Lucida is a lamentation for his mother. An anatomy of the grief of the surviving singular I/eye, Camera Lucida details the search for the perfect image, the punctum of the photograph which will return her to him. Employing public and “private” photographs, Barthes educates his eye to see that he has not seen what he wants to see and to look again. This double action, the recognition of not-seeing and the will to look again, is the lure of the image repertoire. The double action confirms the distinction between the gaze and the eye: the eye, ever hungry, ever restless, temporarily submits to the law of the gaze, the ocular perspective which frames the image, sees what is shown and discovers it to be “lacking.” Not quite the thing one wants/needs/ desires/to see. And what is that thing? An image of self-seeing that is complete. An impossible image precisely because the law of the gaze prohibits self-seeing. Always compensatory, however, the law of the gaze is invested with a lure, an image to distract one from that failure. The lure is the erotic kernel of the gaze. Desire is enflamed by the lure, by the gaping space between the gaze and the eye. In the opening created by the distinction between the eye and the gaze, the seeing I is split (again). The burden of portrait photography is both to reveal and conceal this gap. Developing the negative 35 In Camera Lucida Barthes attempts to find an image which captures some “essence” by which he might recognize and thus retain his dead mother. Restlessly, he rummages through a private and public collection of portrait photographs. Unsatisfied, Barthes keeps looking for the punctum, the partial image (the objet a) which might return her to him. Fort. Da. His partial gaze must see her partial image. In writing of his ongoing search for her return, he plots the perfect image—the glimpse of “essence” that will distill who she was for him. (We are, despite our best intentions, stuck with essences, and essentialisms. And perhaps never more fully than when the body of the beloved has vanished. For in that disappearance we are made to feel again the grief of our own essential absence from our deepest selves, our failure to answer our most central questions: “Margaret, are you grieving?”) At last Barthes secures the image he believes will return her to him. He calls it the Winter Garden photograph and withholds it from us. (To display her “perfect” image to us would be to reveal both too much and too little. The paucity of the image would not withstand our hungry all- consuming eyes.) Barthes turns the image over, shows us the blank back, and locates her in his imagination of her childhood. Grieving because she will not be a witness to the rest of his life, Barthes consoles himself with an image of her life before he was a witness to it. In turning back to an image of her before his birth, he is able to imagine himself without her. I All portrait photography is fundamentally performative. Richard Avedon argues that portrait photographers learned about acting from the great painters of self-portraits, and especially from Rembrandt. Avedon encounters a carpenter in his home who is the spitting image of Rembrandt. After Avedon shows the carpenter Rembrandt’s self- portraits (and the carpenter agrees the portraits are him—“This one, of course, was when I was younger”), Avedon sets up his camera and asks the carpenter to imitate the images he has just seen. Rembrandt the carpenter acted Rembrandt the painter exactly. It seemed undeniable to me that Rembrandt must have been acting when he made his own self-portraits. […] Not just making faces, but always, throughout his life, working in the full tradition of perfor- mance. Elaborate costumes, a turban, a beret, a cloak, the rags of a beggar, the golden cloth of a sultan, and someone’s dog—really per- forming in a very self-conscious way. (“Borrowed Dogs”: 16) 36 Unmarked Like Barthes who called photography “a kind of primitive theatre” (Camera Lucida: 32), Avedon accents the artificiality (the art-fiction) of photographic portraiture. Portrait photography tries to make an inner form, a (negative) shadow, expressive: a developed image which renders the corporeal, a body-real, as a real body. Uncertain about what this body looks like or how substantial it is, we perform an image of it by imitating what we think we look like. We imagine what people might see when they look at us, and then we try to perform (and conform to) those images.1 These ideas are based on what we think we see when we look at people we believe we resemble—beggars, sultans, dog owners. Costume and fashion function to perfect the image stereotype. Wanting to look like someone else, we quote and imitate the look of the visible model. And even trend-setting models like Madonna try to look like someone else—Marilyn Monroe, for the moment. To recognize oneself in a portrait (and in a mirror) one imitates the image one imagines the other sees. “To imitate is no doubt to reproduce an image” (Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts: 100). The imitative reproduction of the self-image always involves a detour through the eye of the other. “The gaze I encounter […] is not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other” (ibid.: 84). Like Virginia Woolf’s conception of letter-writing as an attempt “to give back a reflection of the other person,” portrait photography reflects the transference of image between the photographer and the model.2 Like a good correspondence, the model’s reply to the inquiry of the photographer is based on the quality of the photographer’s question. Portrait photography is the record of the model’s self-inquiry, an inquiry framed and directed by the photographer’s attempt to discover what he sees. Models imitate the image they believe photographers see through the camera lens. Photographers develop the image as they touch the shutter; models perform what they believe that image looks like. And spectators see again what they do and do not look like. The performative nature of portrait photography complicates the traditional claims of the camera to reproduce an authentic “real.” Champions of photography at the turn of the century praised the camera for capturing nature so adequately that photography made art the “same” as nature.3 To see a mountain and to see a photograph of a mountain communicated the same feeling of awe, or so the argument went. But as Heidegger succinctly pointed out, “for something to be the same, one is always enough. Two are not needed” (Identity and Difference: 23–4). In the photographic field, however, one is never enough. Reproduction within portrait photography is always a double copy: an imitation of the gaze of the other and a copy of the negative. As Rosalind Krauss has argued in her rereading of Walter Benjamin, the very concept of artistic “originality” is made impossible by the ontology of the Developing the negative 37 photograph itself.4 Without a stable “original,” the status of the real also comes under scrutiny. The model’s body is “real,” but the image of that body is, like all images, an account of the gaze’s relation to the lure. The art of the photographer resides in the staged confrontation with the surface of the print, and the art of modeling resides in the confrontation with one’s body, the surface image upon which subjectivity is visible to the camera’s eye.5 For Avedon the performative emerges in the dual manipulation of the surface of the photographic image and the surface of the model’s body. Portraiture is performance, and like any performance, in the balance of its effects it is good or bad, not natural or unnatural. I can understand being troubled by this idea—that all portraits are performances—because it seems to imply some kind of artifice that conceals the truth about the sitter. But that’s not it at all. The point is that you can’t get at the thing itself, the real nature of the sitter, by stripping away the surface. The surface is all you’ve got. You can only get beyond the surface by working with the surface. All that you can do is to manipulate that surface—gesture, costume, expression—radically and correctly. (“Borrowed Dogs”: 17) Perhaps no contemporary photographers are better known for their manipulation of the image of the body, the surface of subjectivity, than Robert Mapplethorpe and Cindy Sherman. In contemporary culture that subjectivity is related to a discourse of sex and sexuality. The aesthetic motivations and ideological impulses behind their manipulations are different and yet the fundamental desire to toy with the surface of the image and to expose the erotic theatricality of the sexual body, is common to each.
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