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.