Five Wounds: Daguerreotypes

Susan Sontag's On Photography is a classic introduction to the medium, whose influence can be felt in almost all subsequent discussions. But there is a problem with it, in that actual photographers do not recognize its depiction of their activities, or perhaps more significantly, do not identify with its description of their motivations. Consider the following passage:

What is being urged is an aggressive relation to all subjects. Armed with their machines, photographers are to make an assault on reality – which is perceived as recalcitrant, as only deceptively available, as unreal. ‘The pictures have a reality for me that the people don’t’, Avedon has declared. ‘It is through the photographs that I know them’. To claim that photography must be realistic is not incompatible with opening up an even wider gap between image and reality, in which the mysteriously acquired knowledge (and the enhancement of reality) supplied by photographs presumes a prior alienation from or devaluation of reality. [On Photography, p. 121]

The idea that photography is at war with reality seems counter-intuitive to most of its practitioners, who also take exception to the idea that they are all, by definition, alienated voyeurs. An alternative point of view is advanced eloquently by Nan Goldin:

The instant of photographing, instead of creating distance, is a moment of clarity and emotional connection for me. There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I’m not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history. [The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, p. 6]

In a later interview, Goldin explains, again in implicit counterpoint to Sontag, 'For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It’s a way of touching somebody – it’s a caress' [Nan Goldin: I'll Be Your Mirror, 1996, p. 452].

One of the protagonists of Five Wounds is the thief Magpie, who also works as a daguerreotypist. Daguerreotypes were created by a photographic process that yielded a unique, positive image. They were popular in the 1840s, but were subsequently rendered obsolete by William Fox Talbot's introduction of negatives, which permitted multiple prints to be made of any individual image. In the world of Five Wounds, however, the daguerreotype remains central. I chose it over other better-known photographic processes as a way of returning to the pre-history of an overfamiliar technology: to draw attention to unchallenged and unacknowledged presuppositions surrounding its later, more familiar variants, whose characteristics we retroactively assume to be given or inevitable. Other examples of this same technique in Five Wounds include the use of heraldry to think about superhero costumes and the introduction of a character with a mutant strain of rabies to think about werewolves.

Magpie's activities as a daguerreotypist are therefore a parody of the argument of Sontag's book. I started with a thought experiment: What if you were a Martian who had never taken or seen a photograph, and the only evidence you had as to what that activity might involve was Sontag's book? What kind of person would you imagine the ideal photographer to be? The answer is: a freak; an alienated thief. In the extract below, Magpie describes his philosophy.

1 AT first, Magpie had paid prostitutes to pose in his studio. They required no explanations, but in other respects they were not ideal subjects, because they had mistaken assumptions about the nature of his interest. He did not want the illusion of intimacy. 

2 To remind himself of this, he removed the faces from their portraits. It required little force. A single motion of his thumbnail would do it. 

3 ‘Don’t squirm. You’ll only get scratched.’ 

1 UNDER a magnifying glass, which revealed detailsinvisible to the naked eye, the image was fully present. More present than the living bodies of the prostitutes had ever been. 

2 ‘Pretend you’re dead if you like. That sometimes helps people stay still.’ 

1 MAGPIE would eliminate what was inessential and reveal what others could not bear to see. 

2 He would steal from his subjects the revelation of their deeper selves and the truest aspect of the world they inhabited. 

3 He would photograph the shift between the face people presented to others and the scratched face they revealed involuntarily and refused to acknowledge. 

In fleshing out this account, I did, however, draw on the work of several actual photographers to create the character of Magpie, as indicated below.

Above: Magpie's Photographic Influences

Of these acknowledged influences, Witkin and Arbus are both famed for their interest in freaks, and in Witkin's case, for his habit of photographing corpses. Both photographers are paraphrased or alluded to within the novel (e.g. the extract above includes a paraphrase of a remark by Arbus); and, indeed, one of the epigraphs used at the beginning of Five Wounds is a quotation from Arbus. Bellocq photographed sex workers in early twentieth-century New Orleans, and several of his images, infamously, have the faces of the subject scratched out (below: Plate 29 from Storyville Portraits by Bellocq).

This defacement has prompted much lurid psychosexual speculation in a manner derivative of Sontag's analysis: for example in Michael Ondaatje's novel Coming Through Slaughter (which features Bellocq as a character). There are in fact much more innocuous reasons why someone - not necessarily Bellocq - may have defaced the images. The obvious explanation is that it was at the request of the sitters, to preserve their anonymity. However, as in my (ab)use of Sontag's book, I picked up on this motif - of scratched-out faces - and gave it a more sinister origin related to Magpie's psycholgy; but I also asked Dan to use it for quite different purposes in the illustrations depicting one of the other characters in the novel: Cuckoo, the man with a wax face. He is always represented with a scratched-out face, in homage to Magpie, and hence to Bellocq (below: a plate from Five Wounds, Cuckoo's reflection).

[Pie chart diagram and Cuckoo portrait created by Dan Hallett.]

Plate 29 from E. J. Bellocq, Storyville Portraits

She’s naked, with her back to me, standing on a bare floor, facing a bare wall. Her toes touch its skirting board. Her right hand is raised to the scratched outline of a butterfly on the wall. Her face, which was presumably once visible in profile, has been scratched off the glass-plate negative. I see no reason to infer sinister motives for this. Whoever did it – not necessarily Bellocq – may have wanted to protect the woman’s identity, perhaps at her request. Other ruptures in the image’s integrity are more obviously the work of chance. There’s a jagged splinter in the shape of a knife blade missing in the upper left corner and a faint scratch over the tendon on her right heel. Another scratch accompanies a detached flake of emulsion on her right buttock. It looks like a parody of an eighteenth-century beauty spot.

Plate 1 from E. J. Bellocq, Storyville Portraits

She’s topless, with the gown drawn down from the shoulders to form a shallow ‘V’ underneath the breasts. Her eyeline moves out of the left side of the frame, and she’s sitting at a slight angle to the camera. As is often the case when Bellocq uses a white screen as a backdrop, he doesn’t crop the frame accordingly, so the screen remains clearly identifiable, floating unfocussed in the background. Two corners of the plate are missing, leaving angular, black shapes on the print that cut sharply into the screen’s diffused outline and complement the angles of the gown’s bunched fabric. Her hair is arranged and parted neatly, with only a single loose wisp behind her left ear. Her complexion is clear and even. She has nothing to protect or individuate herself – no prop or pet or costume – and yet she looks perfectly at ease. Who or what is she smiling at?

Plate 18 from E. J. Bellocq, Storyville Portraits

She’s pinned to the plane of focus – a soldier at attention. She’s naked and prostrate, but she concedes the minimum possible surface area to the camera. She doesn’t hide her breasts or genitals, but she isn’t exactly displaying them either. She’s on her side on a couch, her head supported by a cushion. Her hair merges into deep shadow below her left shoulder. Her right arm twists out of sight, locked behind her hip. Her left arm is squashed into the couch below her, its half-clenched fingers amputated by foreshortening. Her bare feet are dirty. The couch appears to have some kind of covering, into which her left thigh merges, but the insulation isn’t very thick. I imagine that the rattan imprints its pattern on her skin. The shadows underneath the couch are almost blank, as if it’s magically suspended, and the emulsion has disintegrated over her right hip, as it has elsewhere on the plate, leaving nebulous clouds of anti-matter in the air above and around her. A crack in the glass bisects her torso but swerves aside from her face, which retains every detail. She looks at me calmly, steadily, with neither pride nor resignation.

Plate 17 from E. J. Bellocq, Storyville Portraits

The spirals stand for intoxication: the shot glass in her right hand, obscured by motion blur, and the bottle of Raleigh Rye on the table that supports her left elbow. The shape is everywhere: in the lathed table legs, the drapery of an erect statue of a dancing woman at the table’s centre, and (more subtly) in the twist of her striped stocking as it passes over her knee. Her legs are crossed. The left is on top, and—like the shot glass—it’s marred by a barely perceptible blur, as if she’s tapping her foot to a tune in her head.

The diaphanous garment draped over her upper half is neither a dress nor a blouse. I can’t even tell where it ends. Her hair’s pinned up, but not rigorously. Her expression’s neutral, but relaxed.

The chair is a bit more than functional, because there are elaborate turnings on the leg shapes, and a triple stretcher between the legs. The table is even fancier. A piece of white lace displays a tableau of objects. An alarm clock—very useful in a brothel. Then there’s the imposing statue, the bottle (its position coinciding exactly with the plane of focus), an apple, and an identified object at the right. Underneath the table, on a shelf suspended between its legs, are a series of miniature wooden chairs. Each has two feathers attached to its rear of the stile at the top, one on each side. These miniature chairs look like trinkets, the sort of thing one purchases from a child street vendor.

There’s a large, floor-length window on the right with the blind drawn up. Just possibly, it’s a door, not a window. That’s the light source for the photograph. No flash: indirect, barely touching, but definitive nonetheless.

There’s a wall behind her, parallel to the plane of focus. On the wall are six pictures—a seventh may be arranged as a sort of pendant to one of the six. Since the wall is out-of-focus, the subjects are unidentifiable, but at least two are cameo portraits of women. The others might be erotic, but they’re not pornographic: the same could be said of this photograph.

Bellocq normally composes with the subject dead centre, but here she’s displaced to the photographer’s left, or rather the subject is not the woman in and of herself, but the unity of woman, chair and table, the last two indispensable supports to her (literally) shaky sense of self.

It’s possible that Bellocq has caught her off-guard, in mid-blink. But that’s accidental. An honest mistake, between friends.

E. J. Bellocq, Storyville Portraits

The only surviving photographs by E. J. Bellocq are eighty-nine glass plate negatives of prostitutes, which were taken c. 1912 in the Storyville district of New Orleans – the birthplace of modern jazz. These images were never displayed during Bellocq’s lifetime, and were only discovered by chance after his death. Lee Friedlander obtained the negatives in the 1960’s, and by painstaking experimentation with obsolete papers, he managed to obtain useable prints from them. A selection of these prints was published for the first time in 1970, in the volume Storyville Portraits. [1]

A lengthy essay by Nan Goldin, which summarises the results of recent research on Bellocq, as well as describing Goldin's own response to his work, can be found at the website American Suburb X, here (the essay was originally published in ArtForum in 1997).

My next four blog entries will be dedicated to Bellocq's photographs.

[1] A volume with a larger selection of Bellocq's images was published in 1996, but it appears from Amazon that this is already out of print, and that the 1970 version of Storyville Portraits (which I own) is more readily available second-hand.