Break
I need a break from images, I think, so I read poetry by Mark Doty. “Sweet Machine” from Sweet Machine, a book where Doty is so himself, coloring description upon thick description, a language of surface glimmering. How many colors can you name? Mark Doty knows more. I take a break from images, but how can this be, except entirely literally, a break? I need a break because I’m constructing a project of pictures in which it is difficult to turn away, to find a rest for your gaze. I want to confront. I do not want the viewer to back away.
In 2003, Kate Bush writes a review of contemporary art photography. She, writing in the early 2000s, notices a trend that makes me check the date of Doty’s book. She notices that against “prohibitions against photographic exploitation of ‘others,’” photographers have returned to “stock subjects of liberal or humanist documentary: the representation of ‘real’ people whose lives have unfolded outside societal norms.” This time, she insists, the return is complex, raising questions about gaze and Otherness implicit in photography, instead of reifying our exoticizing glare.
In Doty’s “Sweet Machine,” we view a (tentatively labelled through another person’s whisper) “Crackhead,” rubbing himself through frantic gestures on a subway platform. Doty notices his baggy jeans, his hands rubbing up and down to his “skinny ass.” A boy exposed: Doty, with a self-conscious stretch of the imagination, calls him “lovely.” Now, onto the streets, Doty views bus advertisements. A model with a skinny torso that could have been the man from the subway becomes an advertisement, plastered all over. He represents “what we’re supposed to want,” and Doty notices how “the imagery aestheticizes.” The link between circulating (marketing, desiring) images of a body and the encounter with the abject finds a place in Doty’s poem.
“One never understands anything from a photograph,” says Susan Sontag. They don’t tell us much about the world. We just, according to her, accept the world as the camera records it. Understanding, instead, comes from contestation.
I think of the contestation my professor gave to my images. They were “too much.” A contestation against understanding, I thought, which is as good as photography gets. “How do you deal with such narrow-minded people?” my friends asked me.
I do not want a viewer to back away (but I speak too much of my own intentions). With time, even the most abject becomes touched with empathy.
Mild Hallucination
If the past few weeks have been a mild hallucination, it is because I have not spent the time to sit down reflect. Not only is Los Angeles on fire right now, but Tiktok, controversially, is about to turn illegal. So, Daniel texts me, I wait for him to pull up, and he pulls out his phone, with a new app Red Note—apparently, also, “little red book.” It’s a new Chinese Tiktok-imitating app. The Americans are flooding the app. “Welcome to our app,” multiple Chinese people say on video, as Daniel shows me his new endless scrolling feed. “This is insane,” I say. “It’s number one on the app store,” and Daniel shows me an app with Chinese characters scrawled on its icon. Half of the text I read is in Chinese. I stop looking, thinking of a video my friend sent me from the Food Network, where viewers count the length of each cut: one-second cuts consistently. Something about attention span, they said.
I put on a ten minute song to write this. It’s more difficult to listen to new music than it has been in the past. It’s more difficult to read new writing than it has been in the past. And while the days grow longer and longer, I do not feel like I’m growing. I feel like I’m learning how I will grow when I stop putting it on hold for a few months.
I try to think in photos now. I’m figuring out what a visual language is, but it’s too slippery for my mind. When I read, my mind cannot get a grip anymore. I write about Giorgio Agamben’s Notes on Gesture. I wish I had more time.
Nothing I read online seems real anymore, as if writing were ever real in the first place. It’s a digitally dissociated world screening before my eyes. I think if we could choose to create a fantasy, it would be better than the world we’ve made…
I watched an Instagram Reel yesterday. And a woman asked me which video was AI: the two looked nearly identical. Except in one, the woman had more makeup and her face looked more rigid and less expressive. So I said, “that one is AI,” and no, it was not. I thought it did not matter anymore. If I cannot tell the difference, what does it say about her?
I buy a Ruby Haunt recording online on Bandcamp. I got a trial for Apple Music today, after seeing consistent protests against Spotify. I opened the app. And it felt strange adding streaming music to the same library that my purchased music (which has been with me for so many years, that I regret it’s still around). I do not think trading one streaming service for another is a viable option for artists.
Seeing Apple Music with no music to stream yet is like having the option to opt out of social media before it even starts. Before we were all feed-junkies. It’s like I could go back in time and say, “streaming will only impoverish your listening habits: although streaming introduces breadth and algorithms and exploration to your ears, you will never, ever, listen to a song twice.” I know what I own now. I am content. I wonder about Red Note.
I am slowly going through my old playlists to buy each album, with the songs on them. It forces me to listen. Two days without coffee means an album or two singles. I listen to the Ruby Haunt album I just bought, with the song “Carrie.” On my little FLAC player on my computer that I’m using to type this, I feel a small amount of relief. I cannot share this music. I mean, I could. But I cannot push “share” and have it uploaded to a thousand tiny fractals of feeds. I want to tell my friend about this album. I will tell him tomorrow. We will watch a movie. I want to put my phone away, but it is difficult. I feel better after writing this, the hallucination deferred. Feeling like the more my writing seems like a journal, the more scattered life has become, and that it’s time to stop thinking in images, but to turn back to new music and new writing. My eyes are tired, so I will not edit this.
I tell Daniel that I think my style of writing is difficult for AI to imitate. It’s dense in terms of content. The style is more approachable. And Daniel says, “Chat GPT could do it,” and I get angry. I think I’ve fallen into a sort of despair.
I listen to Ruby Haunt. Life fuller please, I think, and wonder about a sort of digital truncation of experience. I think of Byung-Chul Han’s book on Non-Things (or was it The Scent of Time). Rage is all the rage for him. Rage, as a sort of negative and overwhelming, full energy, for Han, is, well, simply, go watch Fight Club: it’s cathartic, it’s antithetical to the ordering of our late-capitalist digital lives. Rage is probably what the arsonists felt, who started the fires in Los Angeles, walking around with blowtorches and destroying the environment and communities. Pendulum from numbness to rage. I listen to Ruby Haunt, and think I’m exempt.
“These little moments are all that we’ve got,” says Ruby Haunt, in a song that plays as I type this. I wish I could say something about the stars, or the universe, or the world around us; I wish I could think of life much bigger than myself right now. But all I can think of is community with a focused, intentional attention. “I’m trying to read more poetry,” I told Daniel, as he showed me Red Note. “It might be good to be away from the feeds,” I told him. “I used to put my phone away, and I’d be without it for a few days,” I said, “but I’ve gotten away from that practice. I need to get back in the habit.” Which is what I said years ago, before starting the habit.
Photo Galleries
Yesterday, I talked to Kathy. We looked at images. And Kathy talked about how, after wandering through a few galleries, pieces started to look bad. We entered a room at Bergamont Station, which is a cluster of art galleries.
In the room: still lives of fruit, burning. And paintings of houses on tableted arches; an abundance of gold foil; little paintings on what looked like the ends of benches. Almost pueblo-style, it looked religious to me. Kathy shrugged. “It looks intentional,” she said. I noticed the gold foil. “It looks like religious icons,” I said, and then, “the benches are sort of pew-style benches,” and “like a pueblo-mission style, with images of Los Angeles,” and Kathy all of a sudden had an entry point to the work. Everyone else started to interpret. It was an entry point that made the work engaging.
We exited the gallery, walking toward another, through an empty parking lot. “I was talking to Agatha,” (who is a photography professor) Kathy said, “and images do not excite me anymore. She said that’s just a part of getting older,” and I said, “I thought the same thing. I almost sold all my camera gear. But the other day, I saw an artist, and his work made me fall in love with photography again.” Kathy said, “well it’s just a part of getting older.” And I wondered whether that was true.
In a class four years ago, I learned about novelty through meditation. Novelty, according to these meditation practitioners, was the first thing to let go of, while we sit and watch our thoughts. We’re attracted to surface, to shine, to chasing after glamour and what seems new to us (which is what photography is great at, especially as marketing). For art, it’s a chase after the original, the provocative, and the authentic. But, as part of this stage in meditation, we will be trapped in our own desire if we are continually drawn to these states of mind. Novelty, like this, is exhausting, keeping you trapped in your own desire—so they say.
We walked through the parking lot towards the fine art photo gallery, looking at pictures of dogs. John Divola on Display made me smile. “Look!” I said. “It’s Divola’s work—I love this.” Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert.
“I’m not familiar with him,” Kathy, the one no longer excited about images said, and I said, “oh he’s big, and I love the movement, and the attention to the chase.” Although so many others can take a photo of a blurry dog—I certainly have—there is a little joy in staring at these prints, with the energy of dogs running. They might not feel difficult nor original, but they have a good energy to them.
We exit to the next room, to the gallery I’ve been looking for. Bryan Schutmaat’s Sons of the Living. And Kathy said, “this looks like Ansel Adams,” and I said, “yeah, a big critique is that these medium/large format desert wanderers all look the same. It’s become a trend. So what differentiates an artist from their genre? How do you transcend the feeling of being just another photo in the same world that others also photograph?”
There is an answer to this, but no one I was with answered. I pointed to some formal decisions, of printing, tonality, and composition that make a work dynamic. The answer, I think, is to look at a work in its own particularity (this might look like Ansel Adams, but what makes it different?), breaking down its elements, and its presentation, and the choices an artist would have to make to present a work. “Look at the tension here,” I told someone, pointing to a light spot at the edge of the frame. “To the way it moves your eye, in contrast to the other edges; the way a fallen pear next to those standing works through repetition and release, adding movement to the frame.” You never graduate from looking at composition, even if it feels naïve to continually point it out. It would be like saying you graduate from language. You must see a work as a language and then it will hit.
We drove to an exhibition of William Eggleston’s dye prints. The images radiated color. And Kathy noted how the composition was technically “bad,” and I pointed to an image I had seen before as an example of what some call anti-composition.
“Everything is composed in one way or another,” I said. “It’s sort of a feature of photography to feel accidental; it’s difficult to do that, maintaining a sense of referentiality, with painting or sculpture.” We looked at an Eggleston print. “Just because an image might not feel balanced properly does not mean that it is not composed. Who determines what proper balance is?” Kathy, at the end, after taking another lap to look at the “formal elements” of the pictures, said, “I feel like I learned how to become a better photographer,” even though we all admitted that Eggleston’s prints felt like an early Instagram the 1970s. The photos transcended that sort of nomination.
I feel like I’m always too late to discovering photographers. Last week, I found Mark Mcknight’s photographs. I stared and stared on a computer screen, so I bought his monograph. I was excited.
I had been asking questions of “what counts as pornography.” I had been asking people about photography outside of the homogenizing image culture of Instagram; or photography outside of chiseled gay male bodies; image culture outside of the same trends I had seen across queer photography. I wondered what a post-Mapplethorpe provocation would be in photography. And I wondered where my own work, on a queer photo project, fit into the history of queer photography. I stumbled onto Mcknight with these questions wandering in my mind. The photos affected me.
A writer from the LA Times, according to Wikipedia, wrote “150 years of the medium at once embraced, absorbed, and reworked.” Which is a way of saying, Mcknight played within his genres, synthesizing and transcending it. No work exists outside history, and the best work embraces it.
To answer my question to Kathy from earlier: treat photography not as a surface to dazzle—that may come on its own—but as an attention to our own curiosity. Photography’s strength is its ability to reference a world (its sticky referential function!); if you are curious about a world, then photography, as a visual language, might articulate an answer.
At the end of the day, Kathy told me that I should get an MFA in art photography, if I choose to go to grad school. And I told her that I’d choose between religious studies and art history, trying to focus on how art shares a structure of religion. It’s a structure where we expect to turn our brain off and just be affected by a work, like walking into a religious service. That somehow art has a power to break beyond the discursive--or at least that’s what we expect from it (think Malevich; think abstract expressionism; think Sonia Delauny). But in reality, all this unmediation; all this desire to be affected (Mark Doty: we sometimes give up our own agency as viewers to try to allow a work to impress upon us) will only make us tired and lose our excitement. We bring an expectation of transcendence without language, and are continually disappointed.
Christianity & Technology
Today, I walked into church for a church meeting early. I sat in the library and picked up a Mary Baker Eddy book. Lead pastor Luther walked in, saying, “if you don’t know, everyone is always late here.” And Ann walked in, looking at the Mary Baker Eddy book that I took from the shelf, which was crusty and corroding in my hand, and asked, “oh is that your bible?” and I said, “no it’s Christian Science. I’m learning about Animal Magnetism,” and Luther said, “We’re very open minded here,” sarcastically, and I said, “it shows,” before starting the meeting.
Pastor Luther and gay intern are going to Cameroon to do some work. They’ll miss a Sunday. So, we decided to broadcast their trip over Zoom. “We will do magic,” the pastor said. Gay intern will send me a video of Cameroon-style worship. Two steps forward, one step back, in a processional dance, before singing, pastor Luther described. Gay intern said, “will we be able to upload it in time for the Sunday service?” and I thought, “maybe if we compress the video correctly,” but did not say that, and instead, on my blank page notepad, wrote down, “Christianity and Technology: the Virtual,” before the Pastor ran into a problem.
“No one will be there to do communion,” he said, and Ann the worship leader looked at Julie the office secretary, and they said, “we can have Lynn do it.” Silence cut the room. The pastor looked at Ann, and said, “I am not opposed, but,” and gay intern interrupted, “the council did not like that last time. They do not like that regular people can distribute communion,”
“But Lynn deserves to distribute communion,” Ann said, and gay intern said, “what about Carol,” and everyone turned to the intern and said, “that’s a bad idea–Lynn could do it but Carol could not,” and the pastor said, “this church does not like progress,” and then the meeting continued.
Pastor Luther and gay intern debated dates for preaching. “Oh, the congregation will get all upset if their pastor is across the world preaching to another congregation.” Or, “they will get upset if their pastor is about to leave and does not send them off with a message,” and gay intern, who seems to want to preach every Sunday and take over, continued to negotiate: “oh you’ll be preparing for your trip…let me preach,” and I thought, “won’t gay intern also be preparing for the exact same trip?” and I thought of this strange little power struggle between the intern and the pastor, knowing, as Julie said earlier, “the congregation is very susceptible. They’re impressionable.” And I looked at Julie with wide eyes, knowing.
For Christmas Eve service, Ann and pastor Luther talked about candles. “Will we have candles on the outsides of the pews?” Luther asked, and Ann said, “yes, as always.” And Ann added, “you know, last year you did not hold a candle, and that did not go well with the congregation,” and pastor Luther said, “well jeeze I guess I need a candle then,” and the gay intern said, “it does not have to be a big candle: just a small one will do. We don’t need to differentiate ourselves from the congregation,” and Ann said, “they’re expecting a big candle.” Two men up front, gripping large and burning candles: A Happy Christmas Eve it will be.
Progress this sanding down of church roles. A democratizing of the church. I thought of a Queer Theology essay, describing the church as a microfascist institution, adopting the structures of “capital,” (especially in ways where the capitalism, as a secular ideology, relies on self-proclaimed freedom from the repression of the church…) which, in some senses, means that the church markets itself in particular ways. God is up for consumption & mediation, implicitly. The divine made real through a contemporary medium. Isn’t that what religion does?
Pastor Luther left the meeting, and Ann and gay intern talked about where Jesus was from. “Was he from Bethlehem?” gay intern asked, knowing that this was a sort of game. “Or was he from Nazareth?” and Julie said, “I thought he was born in a cave.” And Ann said, “well, what’s the answer?” and gay intern (playing a little game), said, “it depends on the source,” and I thought of the synoptic gospel problem, and how these questions were sort of useless (or worse: boring!), and he said, “some authors want to fulfill Old Testament prophecy,” and I stopped listening because I learned this all in a community college class once, and undergrad gets you into trickier territory of “method,” but gay intern continued to speak about reliable testimony, and how the census was “improbable” (why would people travel home to take a census?) and I thought of a book I was reading about first century “reality:” how first century populations believed statues walked and talked, so there’s no point talking about proof based on ancient documents (really: what is there to prove?). Maybe we can talk about imagination. Belief stacked on belief.
My mom and I talked about Donald Trump. About how people expect that he can just do anything. That even before he’s become president, the news is reporting on the legislation that he is passing. People just expect some authoritarian leader; people will believe then make real; people shrug off “democracy,” as if that’s a certain way of looking at things, a certain disposition, and hold on to their masculine authority figure.
I sat at a coffee shop before church today, editing nudes of a guy. After the meeting I told Ann and gay intern about it. Next to me, Christians held a bible study, saying things like “synoptic gospels,” and also, “John’s eyewitness accounts,” and “why are Matthew and Luke the same plot?” without recognizing that the term “synoptic gospels” really sort of breaks down the two latter themes. They were religious with their knowledge. Or they were religious because they did not know. They were susceptible.
And two men sat next to me, on the other side. One opened his laptop. The other stared at him while they talked; the one on his laptop, all of a sudden loading and playing League of Legends. He played League of Legends while his friend sat there trying to have a conversation, and so, I told Ann and gay intern, I sat there shocked and took a picture. “Why did you take a picture?” asked Ann, and I said, “well isn’t it strange? That two people show up to a place to meet and one brings his videogames and stares at them throughout the whole conversation?” and gay intern said, “that’s just how things are these days,” and Ann said, “Patty’s daughter married a man like that. They’re divorced now,” and I thought of the term “virtual,” and told the gay intern, “do you want to go set up the livestream so it works for Cameroon? Or should we do that later?” and he said, “let’s do it later.”
Animal Magnetism, I learned from the two pages I read of the Animal Magnetism portion of the book (before the meeting started), was studied by the French Government and denounced. “The seizures are made up. It’s all a performance.” And Mary Baker Eddy acknlowedged that. But she had something else to say: “its effects upon those who practise it, and upon their subjects who do not resist it, lead to moral and physical death.” Mary Baker Eddy still, in opposition, believed. The government did not.
For Mary Baker Eddy, and for many Christians (or Christian Scientists) that believe today, and for many that believed a while back, freedom only was truly free if you did what the Christians believed. God’s order was the only free order. It was, ultimately, a freedom to believe that we will do magic.
Brat
I put gas in my car yesterday. A tin-can clip of a song from Charlie XCX’s Brat played on the small, advertising speakers (normally broadcasting commercials on a touch-screen) right next to the pump. I recognized the few seconds of the song. The pump clicked. Gas tank full. I put the pump back, twisted the gas cap on, and drove away.
Two Tuesdays ago, I played ambient music while working at church. The sanctuary filled with tone. I explained, while Ann walked in, that I was listening for the relationship (in a recording) between very acoustic instruments and an electronically-processed environment. How do they occupy the same space in a recording? I have a dobro, and wonder how it will play with synthesizers. And I put on examples, and Ann asked, “is this music?” and I said, “that’s a good question,” and Ann and Lynn (her husband) recommended (then later bought me a ticket for) a bluegrass concert, in the spirit of dobro.
When I heard the gas station clip of Brat, I heard, in spite of its garbled, tin-can noisiness, a song. A song labelled a song, then popularized, abstracted, commercialized, and placed on an advertisement screen. A song stripped of its qualities of glamour, surface, and the verneer of production that normally defines a “pop-art.” A song recogniziable, still, through its distortion, its sound-bite status (a song, which is a growing trend, as sound-bite, as fragment-of-song), assimilated into a gas-station experience. A song in five seconds on a gas station advertising screen, as a nod to the culture we belong to.
It is December 12th today, and I am thinking of New Years Resolutions. I completed 2 out of 9 last year, which is not very good (I bought a dobro; I am in the middle of planning an art exhibition, which are the two I completed). And one that I’ve discussed with friends is a commitment to long-form mediums. It’s more difficult to assimilate a 20 minute song from Longform Editions, for example, onto an advertising screen, than a song cut and produced in ways that allow it to be shared through a phone speaker on TikTok.
If I’m more and more convinced that art can be political (art can be public--art can mediate our common life, art can help situate us in the world), then, it’s silly to say this, but art (music, here) should help us pay attention. I read about Felix-Gonzales-Torrez, who, my professor described, engaged in identity politics without being didactic; how do we engage a “politic” without being literally confessional; how do we consider life when it is not so easily reduced to 5 second clips of something that has become ubiquitious? There’s no simple answer, except through a long process of attention.
Hm
My body hums. “Hmmmm.” You know. The way tired bodies do. “Huhmmmm.” A bit more voiced the second time. My foot rings in pain. I wonder the way out by counting the day around me.
I read today about cameras, especially large format cameras, and their ability to render field of view, perspective, detail, tonality, and other technical things. The optics people wrote articles with their hands on fire, minds cold as steel. The artists (the optics people acknowledged this) did not listen. The artists (they said) saw the fire and believe in magic.
So I thought of Gursky and Photoshop, who “brought traditional and new technologies together,” an art book tells me, “using large format cameras for clarity” (which contemporary tiny cameras can do) “and digital manipulation to refine and tile multiple image files into a single photograph.” No more magic camera.
So that’s number one. “Hmmmm” I say.
I read Anne Carson’s book. Not all of it. It would kill you in one sitting. Pilgrimage, desire, foot pain, and complicated lovers. She gets me. I’m working on a photo project. Men I’ve hooked up with next to pictures of a hermitage. She gets me.
For number three, I’m packing up cameras to shoot a dinner tonight. It’s where sustainability people all get together, eat dinner, and talk about what they’re doing to try to help the world. (Many people I know, when I tell them about this, say, “that’s not enough,” but it’s better than nothing. Plus free dinner.) One person, once, asked me, before dinner, if I shot film, and I said, “nope,” and they said, “well it looks like it,” and I said, “the magic is in the appearance of things,” and he said, “Huhhmmm,” and I said, “you understand it.”
Let me tell you (quickly) of desire.
I type slides in at church (slides, like a road, guide worshippers). Archeologists of the digital age will look back and say, “look how faithfully this transcription occurred–there must be some credibility to it, or a strength of faith,” and let me be the first to tell you that I don’t give a damn about God. But I was reading a line, as I was transcribing onto a slideshow, that was naming God: “Refining God; Rescuing God; Renewing God; Ruling God; Reforming God; Reassuring God; Savior of the nations.” A whole lotta God, I thought, because God takes the shape of desire. Who could know these things? I’m no theologian. I only know desire. God of foot pain…I typed out the slides. On Sunday someone will tell me about how lovely this liturgical God is. Who could make this up?
Anne Carson walked a Spanish-road pilgrimage for half of her book. Later in the book, she admits that these were just dreams, supposedly. Captivating dream, a dream I re-read, dream the metaphor for love, dream the hands on fire the ears turned off the eyes blinded in sleep. A dream I read. Hm.
The sustainability group hosted an event last night. This is before the one tonight. And a woman named MJ walked up to me, telling me about recycling in Pasadena. She could not believe it. According to a video that she had seen, given to us by the recycling plant, you do not need (contrary to this woman’s recycling practice in her childhood) to sort your trash. No, the factory does it for you. “That must be really tedious,” she said. “A really bad job,” she continued. “The turnover must be really high,” she said. “Odorous!” she commented. But she saw a video, making the work easier for these hypothetical employees, that she could not believe. Paper gets sorted, on a conveyor belt, by pointing giant fans all around. Whoosh! And the paper, being paper, flies everywhere. It definitely flies out of the trash pile. Sorted! And she did not believe it. “Death by papercuts,” she said, about the workers.
“The camera gives cheap, prompt, and correct facts to the public,” said Naim June Paik in 1957 (I took this from Anne Carson’s book). Correct facts, supposedly, are a magic that MJ does not believe. Who could blame her? Who would believe her?
I’ve stopped counting by now, although you can keep track. There must be some credibility to it. My body singing its hum, my body singing its song of tiredness, longing for a Spanish road pilgrimage in the shape of a dream, not my desire, not my dream. All appearance. Take its shape. Put out the hands of flame.
Sepuya 2
I just said something, written two days ago, about Sepuya self-censoring his images with “hard-ons” in them, in anticipation of censorship. The rest of his work might be nude, but covered. Many not quite nude.
I’m not sure. And so I think about who can say what where, and what counts as porn, or “illicit images” as some ambiguous and lazy people call them, and images that take place digitally now.
In this image, posted by Sepuya today: An image of Sepuya’s work, exhibited at a gallery, has been taken down from Instagram, with no option to contest the removal.
When I walked into a little gay store across from a museum to buy little gay zines, the door was locked and a dog barked at me. The owner walked up to the door and picked up his dog, saying, “he’s friendly. Do you want to help us put up our dildo collection?” and led me through a little hallway, into a room labelled “creature cocks.” And I looked at books. “I’m working on a photo project,” I said, and the owner said, “things aren’t done much on print anymore. It’s all digital these days. People only print nostalgically.” And I thought of gay culture as an online image culture.
Sepuya takes photos of queer black bodies. As someone mentioned in the comments of that removal post, “Instagram/Meta...especially love censoring bodies of color.”
White and Sepuya
I’m working on a little gay photo project and bought a Minor White book to think through it.
Minor White was a gay photographer, who, famously, edited and maintained Aperture Magazine. He’s dead now. His parents found out that he was gay (I think in 1927?), he moved out, then never talked about his sexuality with them. He launched a camera club at the YMCA (this might be ten years later). Then began teaching. His Catholic friend converted him. He joined the army (yesterday, at a gay bar with a guy who used to be a marine: “there are so many things that these straight people did with each other that were gayer than I’d ever be comfortable with!”). He took pictures of soldier friends (the picture that the book features is definitely a gay man). He wrote poems. And then the war ended, and some other things happened (like he lost and regained his motivation to take photographs, he learned how to expose properly when he was 38, and began teaching). He was friends with Ansel Adams, and took wonderful landscape photos. And then, here we go: here’s the start of his trouble. Buckle up.
Never before released, except in this book I have in front of me (which was published ten years ago…), White created a “self-reflective” photo sequence. He called it, The Temptation of St. Anthony Is Mirrors. And in it: male, full-frontal nudes. The dick pics of the 1940s. By the way: that was illegal! No exhibiting or publishing full-frontal male nudes, which, apparently, would’ve outed White from the closet too. He would have been fired. His career would have been ruined. High stakes dick pics! So he put the work in a tiny little book, which the author of this book’s introduction claims is full of “various emotional states, from anguish to ecstasy.” Classic gay. But maybe not so contemporary gay.
I write this little thing slightly hungover from post-gay-kickball festivities at a local gay bar, known to pour strong, cheap drinks. It is 2024. When I ask my gay friends what counts as a gay photo, none of them think that full-frontal male nudity automatically qualifies a portrait as gay.
White continued. He published Song Without Words, which features phallic landscapes (and not-phallic landscapes) mixed with male portraits. And he publishes another sequence, Fourth Sequence, expressing his sort-of repressed gay desire even more. Here, it seems like “gay” or “erotic,” takes place just as much in his landscape photography (a Bay Area version of Brokeback Mountain’s lonesome, pastoral moodiness) as in his repetitive, almost obsessive sequences of male nudes.
And at the time, White “grew disenchanted” with the Catholic church. Being gay will do that to you! And he was “in love” with a woman, except hated himself for not being able to get it up in the bedroom. He literally wondered whether life was worth living at all. The obvious response to this sort of feeling is to trade your 4x5 camera for a little 35mm rangefinder and run around taking street photography, switching your approach to photography from a deliberate, slow medium to an investigative, on-the-fly one. And then he fell in love.
Not with a woman this time: Minor White fell for a dancer, who got him into the Evelyn Underhill brand of Christian Mysticism. I think my gay priest suggested her one time too. And so, inspired again, White took photos, probably giggling to himself, saying “people will think this is inspired by the love of God…but it’s also inspired by my love for the flesh.” The work was called Sequence II: The Young Man as a Mystic, and I can’t help but think of this strange relationship between landscape photography, homoeroticism, and mysticism—which Minor White seems to exhibit pretty blatantly.
In 2024, some of my friends keep track of our closeted gay friends. Not that we know for sure, but there are signs: some dig deeply into Christianity. Others might also drop off the grid into nature. I feel like I’ve done both; many of my friends still think of me as primarily a “landscape” photographer, from a time when I was closeted, and probably the most “productive” photographically. And I think Minor White might also demonstrate this correspondence between a troubled sexuality, landscapes, and “spirituality,” in a way that never resolves. And if I ask my gay friends what counts as a gay photo in 2024, it would need to, unlike White’s work (which I might critique because so much of it is relatable), be out and not so repressed; even if that means literalizing an experience that often hides behind metaphor (for White, metaphorized into aesthetics, into religion, into landscapes...).
White began to study “Eastern” philosophy and religion. He wanted his photography to be mystical. He began a residency program that seemed like a hermitage for photography. He wrote about the Tao of photography. He seems to have fully consumed the Kool-Aid of photography, visible in his work The Sound of One Hand. It’s so abstract; it’s so balanced; it’s so contemplative; and then he had a little gay affair that did not end so well!
He wrote, not for the first nor last time, in his journal, “for anyone who likes self pity—homosexuality is a grand source.” He took pictures of landscapes in response to this gay affair that feel full of angst. And it’s difficult to separate his approach to photography, his approach to spirituality, and his turbulent love life. He called the work Steely the Barb of Infinity, in an effort to communicate the insignificance of the individual in the face of the infinite. In my mind, that’s a dramatic way to deal with a rocky, closeted gay affair. Dear Minor White: you’re not talking to the infinite; you’re just insignificant in the face of your lover (a lover who sent White a poem, after it seems like White had processed his feelings, announcing his marriage to a woman—very Call Me By Your Name).
And then, off to another little gay affair for Minor White, with Bill LaRue, and then Drid Williams. Road trips with both of them; environmental portraits with both of them, in a sequence with images so jagged they almost look like collages. His sequences of men correspond with what he says about his love for men, in a letter to Edmund Teske (who sent him images, apparently homoerotically-coded, to publish in Aperture): “a tragic story of a man’s life…inner conflict that is neither resolved by solution or by death. Not a pleasant story…” And in his homophobic closeted gesture, White takes one of Teske’s male nudes and crops the “nude” out of it to “universalize” it. Homophobic little censorship. What a stupid thing to do.
Finally, it should come as no surprise that White shrugged his apathetic, spiritual, apolitical little shoulders when one of his colleagues was outed and then fired. That’s so Zen of him to do. And then he died, and the author notes that one of White’s last photographs is “a testament to the enduring power of White’s vision and a manifestation of his transcendent spirit.”
It should be clear by now that I’m not so happy with Minor White. Although he’s a great photographer, and also a product of his time, he presents landscape and spiritual approaches to photography in tension with a repressed, self-hating approach to his sexuality. Except for one moment of bliss, combining his love for the divine with a love with a dancer, his photographs are expressions built on a homophobic self in a homophobic society. And while a modernist might praise White’s art for being expressive, we live in 2024: White’s expression corresponds to something politically regressive. A gay male photography in the United States in 2024 must be different. A gay male photography cannot be closeted.
The other day, I spent the morning at the Getty, which is where I bought Minor White’s book, along with one by Paul Mpagi Sepuya. Sepuya is a black, queer photographer. And when I shoot portraits of gay men, I bring Sepuya’s images to show them, because they’re ambiguous, fragmented, and help the session break into something more open-ended.
According to Sepuya, most of his portraits rely on desire. For him, it is important that he photographs friends, or people who could be potential lovers. So he shoots queer bodies.
In the Spring, 2024 edition of Butt Magazine, which is a queer zine, Sepuya releases “unreleased” images. They were censored by him, anticipating censorship by others. “At a recent show, I had difficulty with my gallerist insisting that a hard-on couldn’t be in the initial gallery sightlines—it’s threatening. Collectors often comb through images to make sure there’s no nudity. But I’ve gotten over that. Sort of.” And, in this edition of Butt Magazine, Sepuya gives us images of guys, where “horniness” was the foundation of the images. For collectors, horniness is too “threatening,” although this is the territory where he feels like he’s putting his sexuality into his art. By dealing with his sexuality, in a way he calls “vulnerable,” Sepuya enters the very-queer territory between porn and art.
There’s nothing so deep about it. Seupya’s self-censorship for the art world is, at the very least, interesting. And Minor White’s whole closeted situation, making beautiful landscape prints that seem fueled by sexual repression and longing, seems interesting to me too.
For all of this, I wonder about the desexualization of queerness. I wonder about the desexualization and abstraction of a sexual orientation. That gap where sexuality becomes identity. If photography is a medium of representation, then I guess I wonder what is being represented. Identity like a castrated queerness; a contemporary queerness analogized to the biblical eunuch. I’m not so sure what to make of it.
WHO IS THIS FOR
I’ve been working on this gay photo project, kind-of on and off, and two days ago I took pictures of Kristopher, who said, in addition to other things (“gay is gay face,” “gay is erotic”), “gay is making your own rules,” before we hooked up, because, for everyone, “gay” has, fundamentally, been “erotic” or “sex,” and so, I’ve shot a lot of bedroom portraits, always looking at objects like Kristopher’s dildo-candle that he won at the Eagle, which, if object and place represent a culture and rules we create, are still centered on sex.
So, the next day, eating tacos for taco tuesday, I texted Kathy, “hey do you want to see the art project I’ve been working on,” and she said, “Yeah!,” so I drove to the community college, where Kathy was helping Jim (an older man who works at the college) hang up portraits for the portraiture class. And I placed my laptop on the table, while I separated fused magnets for Kathy and Jim, and they talked about the portraits. I said, “why are these all pictures of women?” because there were two display cases of portraits of only women, and Jim said, “no there’s one of a guy; they used to come here all the time” and I turned to look, across the hallway, at the very edge of a case, a man dressed in drag. “Uh that’s drag,” I said, and Kathy said, “why do you assume he uses they pronouns,” and I said, “they is ambiguous and neutral, plus drag is she, playing on femininity,” and Jim said, “dudes never like their pictures getting taken,” and I burned a bit on the inside, and told Kathy, “I have over a thousand pictures of gay men on my computer right now,” and showed her the pictures.
“This isn’t you,” said Kathy, and I said, “well it literally is,” and she was like “Blake you’re more conceptual than this,” and I said, “yeah I know these are very literal portraits, and you’re kinda addressing one of the difficulties I’ve had with this project; during the sessions, I’ve turned to these men and said, ‘this is out of my comfort zone because normally I have a working concept, but I feel like that’s really prescriptive for portraits, and I don’t want to reduce your existence to an abstract concept,’ so I’ve been asking these men to do theoretical work, by defining for me, themselves, and the camera, what gay means to them, in an open-ended way, so that I’m not just finding images to support my own definition,” and Kathy said, “I think you need a new mentor for this project because I don’t think these are interesting. They’re not you. They’re not conceptual enough,” and I said, “you’re right,” and then, after Kathy (who is straight) said a lot more, that was not very helpful but incredibly discouraging, I walked away, going to an event to test out an $8,000 camera at Samy’s Camera. I sat in the car, pulled out my phone, and told my friend,
“WHO IS THIS FOR?”
Because the only reviews of this work I’ve gotten from gay men have been, “you’re a great photographer and I love these,” or if I send them, for example, a picture of a foot piercing the sheets and folding the fabric in an anxious and energized angle, they’ll say, “holy shit,” but show that to Kathy and she’ll say, “that’s not very interesting,” and show the picture of a barely-showing cock cage to my mentor, who is a straight man, and he’ll say, “I think that’s a really subtle, tender, and intimate photo, but I’m curious what the blue thing is,” and I’ll say, “that’s his cock cage,” and immediately, although not aesthetically supported, the mentor says, “THAT’S TOO MUCH,” as if the euphemistic, deferred suggestion that gay has something to do with non-normative sex is way off the script. And I told my dad about this gap between gay and straight audiences, and he said, “bridge the gap,” and I said, “all I can do is show them the gap, I can’t bridge it for them,” (I told snooze, differently, that all I should do is put portraits of every person, even the photos from sessions that the professor said had failed, with each subject’s definition of “what is gay,” because snooze said, “if I had seen this when I were younger, this would be really really powerful,”) and the question keeps coming back, always, WHO IS THIS FOR?
While I drove to Samy’s Camera, Taylor said that he’d show up with his wife in a bit, after their Ikea run, and I walked up to a studio setup, surrounded by people who brought their own cameras to an event designed to test a very expensive camera, when the host in a Fuji shirt saw me walk up, and immediately put an $8,000 camera into my hands, asking whether I brought my own memory card (No?? I said), and I saw the studio setup, which was plain to me, without dynamic lighting, and a woman centered against a backdrop as a model, and I rolled my eyes, took the camera, and began shooting pictures of people taking pictures of the model. The host came up to me. “You can tell the model what to do. She’s very obedient,” and I said, “oh, sure,” and I kinda told her to look around, and she defaulted, as if programmed, to sexy-poses, and I said, “you don’t have to do that,” and moved the light, and the host said, “dude I love the shadows where you put the light,” and I said, “thanks.” I walked to the side of the studio, where the model could face me directly, and I said, “I’m sorry but I’m just testing out how this camera looks, and could you do a pose that gives me a bit of depth, like putting your arms out in front of you? Yeah. So, your shirt looks really spooky! It’s October! It’s giving ghost!” and she was like “someone else said that my shirt was very-fall today,” and did this sort of arms-reaching-towards-me pose. From a side profile, against the backdrop, where most people stood, it looked zombie-frankenstein. And so I said, “thank you!” and she smiled, and then, one of these short nerds who brought his own camera ran up and spat out, “DO THAT POSE AGAIN,” but from his angle it looked flat and awkward. I walked up to Taylor’s wife. “Isn’t it weird that all these men are camera nerds, with their own memory cards and own cameras, surrounding this woman and taking pictures of her?” and Taylor’s wife said “I have not been able to stop thinking about that” and I said, “it’s weird. When I was at community college today, most of the portraits they had were of women!” and Taylor said, “this is so creepy,” and I said, “yeah,” and we walked around the store catching up, when a man followed us, asking about how my camera performs for low light events, and I said, “well it’s usually not a big deal,” and then he said, with his $50 camera, “Oh it’s awful for me,” and Taylor, later, said, “remember when that guy tried to tell you what ISO is?” and I said, “oh god.” I do not think, if I were given $10,000 for equipment, that I would ever buy that camera. Our consensual review of this event, altogether, was “that was creepy,” and we all know who it was for: the ones who brought their own memory cards to store away, in their own personal computers, images of this woman, subjected to their gaze and made interesting.