by Susan Sontag
On the endpaper at the back, a familiar kind of image. A pack of journalists, paparazzi, standing, densely crowded together, straining, shoving, taking their images by force. (Is there any justice in the fact that the international word for predatory photographers who jump their celebrity targets is Italian?) Shallow space: everyone is seen partially, close up, indiscreetly. Not enough of the room to identify it, no decor—this is a placeless space. And everyone is in a big hurry.
THE FUNCTION OF an anthology is to represent a world. This anthology, this token chronicle of a century, represents a world as it submits to the imperatives of time.
Most of the pictures are records of a highly distinctive society that is profoundly used (in several senses of the word), the Italy mourned by Pasolini in Uccellacci e uccellini, the Italy that no longer exists, or is dying, in the throes of being replaced, since the 1950s, by the trans-Italian Italy of the consumer society. The difference between the two Italys is enormous, visceral, shocking.
The distinctive Italy was a society in which the photographer’s practice was an incursion: the photographer could be only an observer. In the new Italy the photograph and photographic activities (TV, video, monitoring, playback) are central. It seems a new version of the way that photography has participated in the past not only in the commercialization of reality but in its unification. The Alinari enterprise, founded in the early 1850s, could be regarded as itself an instrument of the subsequent political unification of Italy, as the scope of the firm’s activities, which first had only Florence as its subject, broadened to include the countryside and other cities—the whole country. Now, for several decades, Italian photography—photographic endeavors by many hands—has participated mightily in the project of unifying Italy culturally (which also means politically) with Europe, with the Atlantic world. Photographic images play a large role in making Italy (be? or only look?) more and more like … everywhere else.
All of Europe is in mourning for its past. Bookstores are stocked with albums of photographs offering up the vanished past for our delectation and reflex nostalgia. But the past has deeper roots in Italy than anywhere else in Europe, which makes its destruction more defining. And the elegiac note was sounded earlier and more plangently in Italy, as was the note of rancor—think of the Futurist tantrums about the past: the calls to burn the museums, fill in the Grand Canal and make it a highway, and so on. Comparable anthologies of photographs of, say, premodern France or Germany do not move in quite this way.
The depth possessed by these images of an older Italy is not just the depth of the past. It is the depth of a whole culture, a culture of incomparable dignity and flavor and bulk, that has been thinned out, effaced, confiscated. To be replaced by a culture in which the notion of depth is meaningless. That is not meant to be sauntered through. That becomes an abstraction. To be seen as an image. To be seen from the air …
[1987]
On Bellocq
FIRST OF ALL. the pictures are unforgettable—photography’s ultimate standard of value. And it’s not hard to see why the trove of glass negatives by a hitherto unknown photographer working in New Orleans in the early years of this century became one of the most admired recoveries in photography’s widening, ever incomplete history. Eighty-nine glass plates in varying states of corrosion, shatter, and defacement were the treasure that Lee Friedlander came across in New Orleans in the late 1950s and eventually purchased. When, in 1970, a selection of the ingeniously developed, superb prints Friedlander had made was published by the Museum of Modern Art, the book became, deservedly, an instant classic. So much about these pictures affirms current taste: the low-life material; the near-mythic provenance (Storyville); the informal, anti-art look, which accords with the virtual anonymity of the photographer and the real anonymity of his sitters; their status as objets trouvés, and a gift from the past. Add to this what is decidedly unfashionable about the pictures: the plausibility and friendliness of their version of the photographer’s troubling, highly conventional subject. And because the subject is so conventional, the photographer’s relaxed way of looking seems that much more distinctive. If there had once been more than eighty-nine glass negatives and one day a few others turned up, no one would fail to recognize a Bellocq.
The year is 1912, but we would not be surprised to be told that the pictures were taken in 1901, when Theodore Dreiser began writing Jennie Gerhardt, or in 1899, when Kate Chopin published The Awakening, or in 1889, the year Dreiser set the start of his first novel, Sister Carriethe ballooning clothes and plump bodies could be dated anywhere from 1880 to the beginning of World War I. The charges of indecency that greeted Chopin’s second novel and Dreiser’s first were so unrelenting that Chopin retreated from literature and Dreiser faltered. (Anticipating more such attacks, Dreiser, after beginning his great second novel in 1901, put it aside for a decade.) Bellocq’s photographs belong to this same world of anti-formulaic, anti-salacious sympathy for “fallen” women, though in his case we can only speculate about the origin of that sympathy. Until recently we knew nothing about the author of these pictures except what some old cronies of Bellocq’s told Friedlander: that he had no other interests except photography; that “he always behaved polite” (this from one of his Storyville sitters); that he spoke with a “terrific” French accent; and that he was—shades of Toulouse-Lautrec—hydrocephalic and dwarf-like. It turns out that he was an entirely normal-looking scion of the New Orleans middle class (his grandparents were born in France), who also photographed quite conventional subjects as well as other low-life ones—for example, the opium dens of New Orleans’s Chinatown. The Chinatown series, alas, has never been recovered.
The Storyville series includes two pictures of parlor decor. The interest for Bellocq must have been that, above a fireplace in one picture and a rolltop desk in the other, the walls are covered with photographs surrounding a central painting, photographs with the same contrasts as the ones he was taking: all are of women, some dressed to the nines, some erotically naked. The rest of Bellocq’s photographs are individual portraits. That is, there is a single subject per picture, except for a shot of two champagne drinkers on the floor absorbed in a card game (there is a similar off-duty moment in Buñuel’s unconvincing, notional portrait of a brothel in Belle de Jour) and another of a demure girl posing in her Sunday best, long white dress and jacket and hat, beside an iron bed in which someone is sleeping. Typically—an exception is this picture, which shows only the sleeping woman’s head and right arm—Bellocq photographs his subjects in full figure, though sometimes a seated figure will be cut off at the knees; in only one picture-a naked woman reclining on some embroidered pillows—does one have the impression that Bellocq has chosen to come in close. Central to the impression the pictures make on us is that there are a large number of them, with the same setting and cast in a variety of poses, from the most natural to the most self-conscious, and degrees of dress/undress. That they are part of a series is what gives the photographs their integrity, their depth, their meaning. Each individual picture is informed by the meaning that attaches to the whole group.
Most obviously, it could not be detected from at least a third of the pictures that the women are inmates of a brothel. Some are fully clothed: in one picture a woman in a large feathered hat, long-sleeved white blouse adorned with brooch and locket, and black skirt sits in the yard in front of a low black backdrop, just beyond which frayed towels are drying on a laundry line. Others are in their underwear or something like it: one poses on a chair, her hands clasped behind her head, wearing a comical-looking body stocking. Many are photographed naked—with unpretentious candor about, mostly, unpretentious bodies. Some just stand there, as if they didn’t know what to do once they had taken off their clothes for the camera. Only a few offer a voluptuous pose, like the long-tressed adolescent odalisque on a wicker divan—probably Bellocq’s best-known picture. Two photographs show women wearing masks. One is a come-hither picture: an exceptionally pretty woman with a daz
zling smile reclines on a chaise longue; apart from her trim Zorro-style mask she is wearing only black stockings. The other picture, the opposite of a pin-up, is of a large-bellied, entirely naked woman whose mask sits as awkwardly on her face as she is awkwardly posed on the edge of a wooden chair; the mask (it appears to be a full mask minus its lower half) seems too big for her face. The first woman seems happy to pose (as, given her charms, well she might); the second seems diminished, even foiled, by her nudity. In some pictures, in which the sitters adopt a genteelly pensive look, the emotion is harder to read. But in others there is little doubt that posing is a game, and fun: the woman in the shawl and vivid striped stockings sitting beside her bottle of “Raleigh Rye,” appreciatively eyeing her raised glass; the woman in ample undergarments and black stockings stretched out on her stomach over an ironing board set up in the backyard, beaming at a tiny dog. Clearly, no one was being spied on, everyone was a willing subject. And Bellocq couldn’t have dictated to them how they should pose—whether to exhibit themselves as they might for a customer or, absent the customers, as the wholesome-looking country women most of them undoubtedly were.
We are far, in Bellocq’s company, from the staged sadomasochistic hijinks of the bound women offering themselves up to the male gaze (or worse) in the disturbingly acclaimed photographs of Nobuyoshi Araki or the cooler, more stylish, unvaryingly intelligent lewdness of the images devised by Helmut Newton. The only pictures that do seem salacious—or convey something of the meanness and abjection of a prostitute’s life—are those on which the faces have been scratched out. (In one, the vandal—could it have been Bellocq himself?—missed the face.) These pictures are actually painful to look at, at least for this viewer. But then I am a woman and, unlike many men who look at these photographs, find nothing romantic about prostitution. That part of the subject I do take pleasure in is the beauty and forthright presence of many of the women, photographed in homely circumstances that affirm both sensuality and domestic ease, and the tangibleness of their vanished world. How touching and good-natured the pictures are.
[1996]
Borland’s Babies
1
THE TITLE IS The Babies. More than one. A group. A fellowship, it appears. More than one such fellowship or band or coterie. A world.
A cunningly sequenced album of pictures inducts us into this world.
It would convey little to have only one photograph. Or two. Or three. To show a world calls for an abundance of photographs, and the photographs have to be arranged. First things first. The last for the last.
The sequence will be a tour of this world. A journey. An initiation.
First we see bits of decor. A small pink satin dress. A teddy bear. A colorful crib sheet printed with cuddly animals. Then, gradually, the presence of the human. A pair of shoes. Bunny slippers. A foot. A knee.
It will be a while before we see faces.
Something doesn’t fit. The accoutrements are those of the nursery. But the human presence is too large, ugly—Brobdingnagian.
We expect babies. These seem to be adult men. The skin of babies, real babies, is perfect. This skin is rough, blotchy, hairy (with here and there a tattoo), the bodies mostly flabby or scrawny—and Polly Borland’s camera scrutinizes them very closely.
Close is ugly. And adult is ugly, when compared with the perfection of the recently born.
As Gulliver observes after reaching a country whose inhabitants are over eighty feet tall: to see enlarged is to be taken aback by imperfections. He recalls that in the country from which he’s come, where he was a giant, the complexion of the diminutive Lilliputians had appeared to him “the fairest in the world,” while his tiny new friends found him ugly beyond imagining. One of them
said that my face appeared much fairer and smoother when he looked on me from the ground, than it did upon a nearer view when I took him up in my hand and brought him close, which he confessed was at first a very shocking sight. He said he could discover great holes in my skin; that the stumps of my beard were ten times stronger than the bristles of a boar, and my complexion made up of several colors altogether disagreeable: although I must beg leave to say for myself, that I am as fair as most of my sex and country, and very little sunburnt by all my travels.
Stranded among the people of Brobdingnag, Part II of Gulliver’s Travels, where he’s the tiny person, Gulliver finds these mountainous bodies and faces repulsive in exactly the same way that he was, in close-up, to the people of Lilliput. But, even while recoiling from their gross imperfections, Gulliver reminds himself—good cultural relativist that he’s become—that the Brobdingnagians are no doubt just as handsome as any other people in the world.
A world, according to Jonathan Swift, and as depicted by Polly Borland, replete with disconcerting oddities.
By the standard of the baby, any adult is ugly, coarse. No beauty of skin can withstand the too intimate scrutiny of the camera.
Beauty, adorableness—and repulsiveness—are mainly a matter of favoring or disfavoring scale, and proximity. And that—scale, proximity—is what photographers deal with all the time.
2
OF COURSE, BEING “CLOSE” is essential to the impact and the meaning of these photographs.
Virtually all of them were taken in some generic, meanly furnished indoors. We may suppose Borland’s subjects to be hiding in these drab, wallpapered rooms which we never see most of, but which feel small. They may only be lying about. (Babies need a lot of rest.) As well as coming and going. We also seem to be offered glimpses of the convening of a boisterous clan. A party of tots. A children’s sleepover.
The photographer has penetrated a space where a secret identity unfolds. An intimate, private space whose banal activities—yowling, drooling, eating, sleeping, bathing, masturbating—here acquire the character of weird rituals, because they’re done by adult men dressed as, and carrying on like, babies.
It has to come as a surprise when, late in the book, there is a photograph of three of the babies in full regalia on a suburban street. (Australia? England?) Surprise that some of Borland’s subjects are willing to offer themselves to the gaze of casual passersby.
3
A PROGRESS OF PHOTOGRAPHS. We are introduced to this world in the guise of parts of bodies, oddly framed and cropped. The initial withholding of faces, and the number of pictures taken from a high angle, bolster the relation of superiority that we, the consumers of Borland’s images, seem invited to have (at first) to these clandestine shenanigans.
We look at them. They don’t look at us. We are rarely shown the babies seeing; when we are, it’s a baby-style gaze, wobbly focus and all, or a look of concentrated self-absorption.
Properly, the book ends with a straight-on portrait of one of the babies, looking adult, even handsome, gazing intently at the camera, at us. Staring back. At last.
4
FOR A LONG TIME the camera has been bringing us news about zanies and pariahs, their miseries and their quirks. Showing the banality of the non-normal. Making voyeurs out of us all.
But this is particularly gifted, authoritative work. Borland’s pictures seem very knowing, compassionate; and too close, too familiar, to suggest common or mere curiosity. There is nothing of the ingenuous stare of a Diane Arbus picture. (I don’t doubt that Arbus would have felt invited by these subjects, but surely she would have photographed them very differently.)
Zeal in colonizing new, especially transgressive, subject matter is one of the main traditions of photographic practice.
Here—says this book—is a specimen of behavior that has a legitimate claim on our interest and attention. The pictures register a truth about human nature which seems almost too obvious to spell out—the temptation of regression? the pleasures of regression?—but which has never received so keen, so direct a depiction. They invite our identification (“nothing human is alien to me”)—daring us to admit that we, too, can imagine such feelings, even if we are astonished that some people actually go
to the trouble, and assume the shame, of acting them out.
5
ARE THESE PICTURES shocking?
Some people apparently find them so. Probably not the same people made indignant by the sex-pictures of Robert Mapplethorpe. Here the shock is produced by scenes from the intimate life of adult men who appear to have all but completely renounced their sexuality.
I, for one, don’t find these pictures shocking or even upsetting. (What shocks me is cruelty, not sadness.)
Shock—which then dilates into aggressive disapproval—seems to me a somewhat pointless reaction to adults who have so dramatically embraced the role of being helpless.
In most of the pictures, the subjects are sitting, lying down, crawling. They are often on beds or close to the floor. They are rarely vertical.
They want to look small. But of course they’re not. So, instead, they look mortified.
There is a presumption, when picture-taking assumes an anthropological or ethnographic function, that the subjects—who happen to look the way they do—don’t really see themselves.
What these pictures suggest—what some may find is disturbing about them—is that not only do Borland’s subjects want to look like this but they relish being seen.
6
MOST OF THE sexual acting-out understood as deviant is theatre. It requires dressing up. It relies on props. And the world created by these adults must be counted as a sexual fantasy, even if, most of them being “baby purists,” they don’t have sex.
What goes on in these depressing rooms is a kind of theatre. Playtime.
