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Intimacy and the Aesthetic: Regarding Elinor Carucci
It sometimes happens that someone else’s work gives you a stab of uneasy rivalry: “I wish I’d made/written/thought of that.” It happens not with any old work one admires, but, rather, rather, when the work in question hovers around your own ideals or ambitions. The photographs I have taken have, until quite recently, been merely tangential to my professional professional aspirations. But as an avid, long term documenter of my own life, when I saw those of Elinor Carucci, I felt the rub and I wondered how she’d pulled them off. The question wasn’t a technical one, but rather, personal: how did she get her mother, her husband, her children, even her grandparents, to collude in that intimate photographic encounter? I remember countless attempts at getting close to my mother with the camera, to which innumerable photographs of her elbow and sleeve attest. “It’s for the sake of Art,” I would moan. “Go do your art somewhere else,” she would invariably retort. I am, in short, aware of how intrusive the camera can be in family life, even when it just sits there on the table, filled with prying, accusatory potential. The work of Elinor Carucci (in the exhibition Intimacy, at the James Hyman Gallery in London, 07.01.09 - 20.02.09, and in the book Closer book Closer)) has invited me to ponder again on the nature of the photographic artefact, on the relationship between the subject and the object of that mechanically or digitally captured gaze, and on the affinities and distances between the aesthetic and the intimate. Born in Israel in 1971 and resident in New York, Carucci has
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placed her self and her close family at the centre of her photographic practice. She captures the pucker of a parental kiss, or the intimate scrape of skin on skin. From a greater distance, we see her mother in underwear and hair curlers clasping her father in a warm or conciliatory embrace. We are introduced to Eran, her husband (also a photographer), whom we see close up as the recipient of a sensuous or only half playfully painful bite, or against whose naked torso she presses her own gorgeous one, long hair aflame in late afternoon light in a hotel room. Holding her newborn twins, Eden and Emmanuelle, one to each full, naked breast, Carucci evokes a Renaissance ideal of maternal tranquility, but later, it is a reluctant child that her naked body enfolds in the bath. Again in the bath bath (there are are many baths!), baths!), we see the artist artist and her cousin, Nataly Nataly,, both lissom and and lovely, lovely, alike as peas peas in a proverbial proverbial pod. Through Through frosted glass, we spy on on her grandfather’s body welcoming a torrent of shower water. A child’s child’s snot, or the tiny disturbance of hair clippings on a little girl’s worried brow, or the curiosity of a small child at her mother’s pubic hair: these become subjects as grave and significant as life’s larger moments. More accurately, they become the very substance out of which those larger events are also shaped. Carucci is particularly good at exploring the tiniest bodily details and evoking their attendant sensations of pain or comfort, irritation or consolation, in ways that invite our corporeal empathy: empathy: we inhabit that sentient body. We can almost feel the bump and stretch and stitch of a recently delivered belly – her own, or the cold, corrosive corrosive smudge of bleach cream cream on stomach hair, hair, again her own. The smear of cherries around a child’s mouth, the tenderness of a bruise, and often,
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the warmth of a patch of sunlight. With Carucci, we pronounce the ‘ouch’ of a cut and stitched finger or a hair plucked from a nipple. And how familiar the marks left in sleep by a crumpled sheet on a naked male chest; the chapped corner of a mouth, a shaved armpit, the rub of a stockinged foot on the floor, the imprint left by a bra or a zip on skin. Menstrual blood, children’s tears, the uneasy proximity of of the the bare skin of parents and adult children: what, the photographs invite us to ask, is off limits? In all her interviews, Carucci recognises that her viewers might expect a definition of those limits: it is almost as if she knows she has to defend herself. She catches herself running for the camera when her father is ill, and then stopping herself. “I don’t pounce on my mother when she’s waking up,” she says. “Don’t get the camera when I have a fight with Eran. Don’t stand aside to document when someone is crying.” 1 And yet the photographs do capture ailments, awakenings, estrangement, tears.
Perhaps what is disingenuous here is the use of the word “document”: it gives us the wrong idea of how the transaction occurs between this photographer and her models (I use this word as a
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shorthand, though obviously I don’t mean the formal studio relationship relationship of artist and model). For, For, like many photographic documenters of their own families (Larry Sultan, Tina Barney, Barney, Phili Phi lip p Lorca diCorcia, Sally Mann are the examples that spring to my mind) Carucci’s photographs are, at least in part, staged rather than spontaneous. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine how it might be otherwise, although for a glimpse of what a spontaneous shot of family life might look like, one could turn to someone like Richard Billingham’s evocation of unemployment, alcoholism and obesity on a council estate in Britain. Through all her exquisitely lit and composed photographs, we are introduced to the cast of characters that inhabits Carucci’s intimate life. But more than this, we are given a picture of a particular kind of life: one where beautiful people with perfect skins –people who feel at ease in their bodies – walk around naked at home and don’t mind being photographed. Indeed, where the photograph is more obviously composed, then what we have are family members who, often if not naked then only partially dressed, don’t mind pausing for that moment of protracted arrest – a moment that signifies a contract between photographer and model – that constitutes the making of a photographic tableau. In their beauty, Carucci’s pictures invite us to ponder whether or how, precisely, she achieves the balance between the potentially potentially narcissistic narcissistic exercise exercise of self exposure and the potentially exploitative disclosure of others. (Unbearably, a photograph showing Carucci and her husband embracing is titled “First Tears Over Another Man”, telling us almost more than we need to know.) A video clip of an interview with her suggests that the more reluctant of her twin children needs to be bribed to allow her mother to photograph her with the reading of a story. 2
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The beauty of almost everyone in Carucci’s photographs, and the beauty of the images that she produces, raise difficulties in equal measure to the pleasure they afford. afford. In Crisis/ Pain , for example, example, a series of works works taken while her marriage was in trouble, it is through the distancing prism of beauty that we are made aware of tension or estrangement, anger or reconciliation. Beauty both sharpens the pain in question, and renders it more remote and unreal: such are the dangers of the aesthetic. Carucci’s work constantly prods us to ask ourselves what the differences are between the beauty of a person (herself, her mother, her husband, her children, her cousin: a family or rare allure) and aestheticisation as a procedure to which the photographer may, or may not, submit her work. It is an old concern in photography, already present, say, in Alfred Steiglitz’s loving and erotic photographs of his naked wife, the artist Georgia O’Keefe. For in photography, perhaps as in life, lovingness and eroticism can be at odds: eroticism in photographs can objectify the beloved even where love personalises him or her. Together with the easy slide that photography photograph y offers between representation representation and and reality, reality, the fact that photography so readily eroticises its objects (while freezing them into marble statues) is in part responsible responsible for the perceived perceived danger of photographing children, even one’s own, and especially naked children. children. I shall return to this.
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The shades of attitude that tinge our responses, as viewers, to what we consider beautiful or not is central to an experience of eroticisation and aesthetic objectification, and so it is often, in the first place, a biographic or anatomical accident (whether the person is young or old, thin or fat, and so on) that strongly conditions our response to a photographed person. The investment of eroticism in the visual field has spawned a rich seam of psychoanalytically psychoanalytically based feminist consideration about the roles of observer and observed in the history of art in general, and in photography in particular. particular. Following along such a vein, several contemporary photographers have used their own bodies in a bid to explore our proclivity to favour and eroticise the beautiful. Such works invite us to see skin and flesh not as the objects of desire, but as vehicles of pain and decay, say in the work of John Coplans, Anne Noggle or Jo Spence. In black and white photographs that are sometimes life size or larger, John Coplans (1920-2003) gives us blunt studies of his own aging body. His face always remains outside the frame, and in this, his works are in keeping with a tradition of photography that seeks to find elements of abstraction in the body, and especially in the body represented as a series of fragments. But Coplans’ frank images also push against the grain of a cultural ideal of masculine corporeality corporeality – youthful, excercised, excercised, toned: the body as carapace or armour. In 1956, in the publication of his Mellon lectures as an important study on the nude, art historian Kenneth Clark described the cuirasse ésthetique , ésthetique , a formalised formalised schema of the male torso that was used in antiquity as the basis for the design of armour armour, but that also also stood, Clark argued, as a bodily ideal: the powerful male body, heroic and in control. control. The body as armour armour – the idealised idealised masculine body – also stands as an amulet against the dangers represented by the softer, more permeable flesh of women, dangers that are traditionally symbolised by menstruation and pregnancy. By positioning himself in
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anti-heroic stances and showing us the uneven hairiness of his body, its cushiony stomach and flaccid skin and genitals, Coplans is, in effect, also feminising himself. Referring to her self portraits as her “saga of fallen flesh,” Anne Noggle (1922-2005) boldly charts the process of her own aging. It is in her lack of vanity and simultaneous ambivalence towards aging, that Noggle’s work is fiercest , funniest, and and most poignant, especially when she stares at us from eyes bruised, swollen swollen and stitched after after a facelift. facelift. More baldly still, Jo Spence (1934-1992) tracked her own confrontation with, and responses to, breast cancer cancer,, from which which she was to die, having refused conventional treatment. With Rosy Martin, Spence developed a therapeutic process that entailed re-staging and photographing painful events from a subject’s past, mainly focussing on the subject’s feelings of vulnerability vulnerability and powerlessness. powerlessness. In thus performing – and making making visible – narratives of self, Spence and Martin hoped to sponsor a photo-cure to counter the more conventional talking cure of psychoanalysis. Nothing could be further from Elinor Carucci’s portrayals of herself naked than Coplans’ or Noggle’s self portraits, or than Spence’s politicised agenda of alienation and confrontation. confrontation. Purposefully using the unaffected, unaffected, unflatteringly harsh lighting of the passport mugshot, Spence makes a point of stripping her self exposure of any hint of an address to the desiring eye. In preferring to look at Carucci’s photographs, we seem to ratify Spence’s point that voyeurism and exhibitionism – the erotic pleasures of looking and being seen – constitute the enemy of an authentic feminine subjectivity. She captured a particularly puritan moment in feminism. But, as I have already observed, the question of beauty is not one one that concerns only only the object of the
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photographic gaze, but also the intention of the photographer, photographer, even where photographer and model are one and the same. Lighting, background detail, detail, framing, focus and depth of field: all of these can be harnessed to advance the aestheticisation of the person or situation being photographed, or to undermine it. In Ballad of Sexual Dependency, her famous visual diary begun in 1979, Nan Goldin deploys clearly de-aestheticising de-aestheticising strategies: harsh lighting, occasional blurs, and apparentl apparently artless, casual framing. Her work, perhaps more than that of any photographer before her, reveals the extent to which the notion of intimacy might spread from its most obvious nest to other locations: from the couple or the family in the domestic space to the workplace, or other spaces of shared experience: bars and bath houses, houses, hospitals and rest homes, homes, and so on. Where Carucci reclaims intimacy for the immediate family, if not necessarily the home, Goldin shows us a different kind of closeness. Intimacy, her work suggests, must also incorporate loneliness and can relate to shared practices rather than concrete spaces (joggers, dog walkers, fetishists, fetishists, and so on), depending depending simply simply on “the kind of connections that impact on people, and on which they depend for living (if not ‘a life’).” 3 Goldin’s first photographs were taken in a bid to reclaim experiences that drink and drugs might otherwise have obliterated: “I became social and started drinking and wanted to remember the details of what happened.”4 Her affecting images of friends and lovers, many of whom were later to die of Aids, look stylistically a lot like those many of us today have on our computers or mobile phones or Facebook page, snapshots of parties and buddies in settings settings that are are sometimes sleazy sleazy,, always contingent. contingent. Perhaps it is for this reason that Goldin is seen as one of the forerunners of the so-called “snapshot aesthetic” that is more commonplace today. Apparently impromptu and serendipitous, such work
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sometimes makes viewers uncomfortable uncomfortable about whether or not what they are looking at is “art”. Carucci’s works, as I have already noted, are artful in the extreme: in their appropriation of the tableau or the detail-as-monument detail-as-monument traditions, they reach us via the expectations generated not by personal snapshots, but by “Art”. Contemporary artists artists whose photographic work announces a more politicised intention (always ideological, ideological, often pamphtleteering) wish to focus on specificity as an instance of a broader injury, and they do so by eschewing the distilled, aestheticised quality that I have been discussing. (Examples might include Langlands & Bell, Phil Collins, or Allan Sekula). For Carucci, distilled instances instances of specificity contain an essence that is, in quite an old fashioned way, universal or eternal: in the delicate caress, the grimace, the stretch mark or crease of skin, we are reminded about what we already know about love or anger, maternity or aging. Perhaps the most tender of these universal themes – and also the most contested – is that of the relation of mothers and children. Carucci is not alone in being moved by her experience of maternity, and by her children themselves, and wanting to capture that experience photographically. In I’m the King of the Castle (1997) , a series of photographs of her son, then six years old, Terry Kurgan delicately attempted to touch upon the taboo terrain of child sexuality and “the equally taboo realm of the representation of the eroticism and intimacy inherent to the mother and child relationship.” 5 The photographs of this little boy are unsettling and touching explorations of the child’s
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experiments with the formation of his own identity. His vulnerability and nakedness, coupled with an empowering and playful role-playing simultaneously evoke anxieties about child abuse and a distilled wonder at the aching burgeoning of this little person. Ten years later, Kurgan was still to comment: “when people meet me for the first time, [they[ still say: ‘Oh, you’re that artist who takes pictures of her children without their clothes on!’” More notoriously, at an exhibition in New York in 1992, Sally Mann sold a record number of black and white photographs of her three children, many of them exquisite nude shots taken in the few years preceding their adolescence. adolescence. The show resulted in the publication of the book Immediate Family. Family. (Much more recently, in a collection of photographs and subsequent book titled Proud Flesh , Mann presents presents photographs of her naked husband, Larry, who suffers from a form of muscular dystrophy). Like Carucci, Mann’s photographs are staged, but hers are more often than not set in the landscape of rural Virginia, where both Mann and her children grew up. The seem to wish to hark to an earlier, earlier, (if mythical) time when nakedness seemed at one with nature, a nakedness represented a kind of self absorbed innocence, yet they are bursting with sexuality sexuality.. Where the little girls perform perform adulthood with a candy cigarette, cigarette, or experiment with their mother’s earring and make up ( Jessie Jessie at Five), Five), they look eerily grown up, oversexualised like Brooke Shields in Louis Malle’s film Pretty Baby, a precociousness precociousness that not only lays itself open to all forms of abuse, but that also exposes an acute cultural anxiety about that abuse. The lighting and stillness stillness of Mann’s portrayals of her children – who are, as children will be – bruised or stung, submerged in water or mud – makes the children look touched. And of
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course this is facilitated by the fact that Mann uses black and white photography, which easily fudges the distinction between resin and blood, or snot and and semen, imbuing imbuing these photographs with an extremely unsettling sensuality. It is, as Marianne Hirsch has thoughtfully mused, “childhood represented represented with a particularly charged cultural context that pits the rights of children against the rights of mothers, that represents represents the family as potentially abusive, that sexualizes nudity and takes it as the measure of violence and transgression.” transgression.”6 This is also the context in which Elinor Carucci takes and shows her photographs, only today, anxiety has probably escalated to panic. But Carucci’s photographs touch not only on concerns about incest or paedophilia, but more generally on parental power. Carucci - like Mann and Kurgan – arouses an uneasy fantasy of maternal omnipotence. Carucci’s works also reveal this context to us, just as her photographs of adults reveal to us our own conceptions of intimacy and our sense (varying, within certain parameters, between one individiual and the next), of the correct boundaries between between the public and the private. While While Carucci remains more more restrained than Sally Mann in her representation of child nudity, her tender and sensuous evocations of her children show her to be tiptoeing through this mined terrain in a bid to negotiate a revision of childhood, and to reclaim something of a sense of familial innocence – to use a difficult word – in the maternal gaze, while remaining cognizant of the potential for the fetishisation fetishisation and eroticisation eroticisation of these images. This is a well-nigh impossible project, and one that begs for the viewer’s constant self reminder than in regarding photography, photography,
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context is of the essence if one is to understand the personal, social and ideological operations that photographic meaning mobilises. The history of photography has been intimately linked to the memorialisation of the lives of individuals, of ordinary people. Photographs form an intimate part of people’s family archives, and indeed, play a constit const itutive utive role in the construction of individual family histories and memories. “Cameras go with family life,” Susan Sontag noted in her inspiring theoretical study of photography photogra phy.. “Through photographs, photograph s, each family constructs a portrait-chronicle portrait-chronicle of itself, a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness.”7 To this extent, while formally aspiring to the condition of art, Carucci’s work assimilates the genre of the everyday snapshot, the photographs we take of ourselves, our parents, children and pets: humble documents that serve us as reminders not only of what we did, but also of where we stand. Photographs work against the tide of time as visible tokens against change and loss, and several of the artists whose work I have considered here along with Carucci’s have poignantly expressed this. Speaking of her photographs of her children, Terry Terry Kurgan recognises in them the extent to which photographs are not only about presence and life, but also about about absence and death death “memorials “memorials to love, loss and longing.” Considering Considering her Ballad of Sexual Dependency , Nan Goldin recognise recognise that the real motivation motivation behind the project was an attempt symbolically to regain access – to regain memory itself – of her older sister, who, when still a teenager, committed suicide when Goldin was eleven. And in her usual matt matter of fact way, Sally Mann has noted that photographing her children was a way of continuing to photograph while being a good mother, while wistfully commenting on the way looking back at old photographs she has taken of her family, it is as if she were rereading old love letters. “They bring on a curious surge of embarrassment, elation, and shamefaced longing.” 8 Talking to Jenny Murray on Women’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 [date], Carucci acknowledged that, when her children are grown up, the important question would be not be what they thought of their mother’s mother ’s work, but what they thought of their mother. It is perhaps by way of justification that, in her writings and interviews, Carucci sets about elaborating the relational process process that her photographs entail, but also the ways in which
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such processes enable the protagonists of her work to realise their relationships more fully. It is as if the engagement itself between the photographer and the model brought about a change – an intensification – in the relationship: the camera, in her family, is not so much an intruder as an instrument that “generated, not just documented, situations... As complicated as the relations between representation representation and life may be, I do trust the camera: what it captures is, in many ways, real. The camera is, in fact, often less biased than my eyes.”9 Some years later, she reiterates this point, but now with a stronger slant on the camera as a binding, almost therapeutic instrument: “you could say that the camera is giving us legitimacy to do something that we were afraid to do – to be softer, not so defensive.”10 If, then, for some people (my mother!), the camera looks like an instrument of manipulation and interference, for Carucci, it enables relationality.
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1
Elinor Carucci, in Closer: Photographs by Elinor Carucci, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 2002, p. 10.
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http://www.artisrael.org/artist/elin http://www.artisrael.org/artist/elinor-carucci or-carucci
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Lauren Berlant, Introduction, in Intimacy , ed. Lauren Berlant, The University University of Chicago Chicago Press, Chicago, Chicago, 2000, p. 4 4 5
Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency , Aperture, Aperture, New York, 1986, p.9. Terry Kurgan, on Purity and Danger , http://www.terrykurga http://www.terrykurgan.com/me/m n.com/me/me2/frame%20me%202.h e2/frame%20me%202.htm tm
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Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory , Harvard University University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1997, p. 153.
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Songag, On Photography, p. 8 check
Sally Mann, in Flesh and Blood: Photographers’ Images of Their Own Families , ed. Alice Rose George, Abigail Heyman and Ethan Hoffman, Cornerhouse Publications, Manchester, 1992, p. 156.
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Elinor Carucci, in Closer , p. 10-11.
Rachel Been, “Interview with Elinor Carucci,”posted on June 9, 2009, http:// network.slideluckpotshow network.slide luckpotshow.com/profiles/blo .com/profiles/blogs/interview-with gs/interview-with-elinor-carucci -elinor-carucci
