Dimensions
Dimensions
Contents
3
Letter from the Editor Maggie Neil
5
Ryan Cavataro
21
Zach Bell
Yale and the Naked Photograph Navy Encinias
33
Interview: Hannah Whitaker Andrew Wagner
39
Wesley Chavis
49
Invitations Stephanie Wisowaty
51
Stephanie Wisowaty
15
Volume 8, Issue 1 Fall 2013
Letter from the Editor
When we saw the strength of the photographic submissions, it was fairly clear that we needed to produce an issue dedicated solely to this one medium. I don’t know if photography is the most popular medium among kids of my generation, or among undergraduate artists at Yale. But we had strong, mature, photographs sent to us, and many, at that. I, for one, was happy with our joint decision, because I love photography dearly. I find it appealing that as a medium, it is constantly facing a kind of identity crisis, caught between its two most explicit essences: as a document and as a form of fine art. I am challenged, intellectually and, if I may say so, spiritually, by the notion that machines, idiosyncrasies accounted for, are capable of being vehicles for artists and for human expression and emotion. It still seems like magic to me.
this notion purely on the grounds of being an objectlover, a lover of good design, and a lover of turning pages. More constructively, I think that once a publication is put together, its very limitedness is also its strength. The collection of work and essays within the following pages forms a unique whole, a package, a union—that is necessarily unique. I don’t know how Navy Encinias’ essay on nude photography at Yale, Stephanie Wisowaty’s personal essay on her own craft, and Hannah Whitaker’s interview responses will be read in light of each other, or in light of the work of the four photographers highlighted in these pages, and by different minds, but I know that with some attention and focus, dialogues will emerge. I think that is precious, and I hope you find so, too.
Despite all this, it has often been brought up that in this age of the ubiquitous digital image, there is no need for art publications, much the less for an art publication devoted to photography. I would dispute
Maggie Neil
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Ryan Cavataro
Untitled, 2013
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Untitled, 2013
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Yale and the Naked Photograph
A few weeks ago in a seminar I’m taking we digressed, our conversation landing on the topic of Yale students, and their occasional desire to take pictures of each other’s naked bodies. As an undergraduate art endeavor, I think nude photography is trite but makes sense: Yale students dress themselves up in all kinds of affect, and naked pictures have the power, I imagine, to expose who we really are “underneath it all.” The professor shared a particular instance with us in seminar that afternoon, when one such student-artist requested some Yale money to photograph some Yale bodies. A gossipy hush fell on the room when the professor––looking to her right and her left and slightly widening her eyes––recalled what she told the student. A scandalous, institutional history of photographing naked students haunts Yale, she explained. None of us knew what she was referring to. She recalled telling the student that should he wish to move forward with his project, he’d need to proceed with awareness––of the tradition he’s inserting himself into. Specifically, he’d need to understand that, for many decades, all incoming Yale freshmen were ushered
Navy Encinias
one-by-one into a windowless room somewhere in Payne Whitney gym and asked to remove their clothes. Men in white lab-coats would then affix four-inch metal pins to the students’ spines using adhesive, at intervals along their vertebrae. The men would then take three photographs: a rear, side, and frontal pose. It’s hard to say precisely why these photographs were taken, but it’s clearly a pseudo-scientific endeavor. In the pursuit of an antiquated variety of knowledge, the photographs strive to document and, in turn, create a strange taxonomy. This practice has a name––physiognomy––and it’s based on the eerie belief that to name is to understand, to document is to possess, to archive is to conquer. Most specifically, it’s based on the belief that the look of a body gives you indispensable and highly accurate information about a person’s character and intelligence. Thousands of photographs of Yale students, it seemed then, was a record of supreme characters and unmatched intelligences––a treasure worth preserving.
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Yale wasn’t alone in photographing its naked freshmen. If you attended Harvard or Radcliffe, Princeton, Yale, Swarthmore, Smith, Vassar, Mount Holyoke, or Wellesley––sometime between 1940 and the early 1970s––you probably had your body photographed. If you Google “yale posture photos” as we all did in seminar that day, a sparse Wikipedia article comes up. It explains the strange practice, that the photographs were “ostensibly used to gauge the rate and severity of rickets, scoliosis, and lordosis in the population.” The second Google hit (“the great ivy league nude posture scandal”) is a New York Times article from 1995, written by a man whose photographs were taken during his Yale orientation week in the mid-60s. The piece is long, personal, and thorough. The lede tells the story of a Yale janitor who discovered thousands of nude photographs, in a locked room in Payne Whitney in the late 1970s. According to the article, the janitor turned the photographs over to the athletic director at the time. The director had the photographs systematically destroyed by a document-disposal professional. A large cache of posture photos was sent to
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be housed in the National Museum of Natural History’s archives in Washington, D.C. The photographs of celebrities and politicians like George Bush and Bob Woodward, Diane Sawyer and Meryl Streep, Nora Ephron and Hillary Rodham were all conveniently lost. Just what a photograph is has been theorized and theorized over again. But for a long while, the objecthood of a photograph was a crucial part of its almost magical singularity. In rendering the immaterial material, the innovation of photographic technology allowed light, time, and space––even human bodies that aren’t ours––to enter a state in which possession is possible. The photograph’s status as object, and the immaterial’s sudden claim to tangibility, quickly popularized the medium and elevated it to the status of art. More strangely, it fed one of our most peculiar and human of desires: to preserve. Photo albums attest to this. A locked closet full of pictures is no different, if more obsessive. Susan Sontag in On Photography, considered the camera “...a device available to record what is disappearing.” Perhaps as
you grow more and more fearful that something is disappearing, the locked closet slowly fills. Of course, few of us today associate photographs so immediately with a notion of objecthood, and the consequential human desire to preserve them. Many of us are driven crazy by photographs of ourselves on the Internet, precisely because they no longer exist physically in our possession, because they belong to everyone and no one in an eerie, immaterial form. Similarly, people warn us all the time that a deleted photograph never truly disappears. To us, photographs can never be destroyed, nothing truly disappears. And so I reacted to the story of the destroyed posture photographs with a weird conviction: that keeping them secret, shredding them, and burning them did little to make them disappear. I heard the story and I could immediately see the bodies. Honestly, I could see mine. I could imagine holding three small B &W photographs, heavy for their size and framed with a thin white border.
I quickly remembered in what ways my body was just slightly different in August of 2010, when I was a freshman. I imagined those differences in the pictures. Very quickly, I was able to imagine myself with four-inch metal pins affixed to my spine, somewhere in Payne Whitney, politely naked. The destruction of the photographs was inconsequential, because it’s not the photographs themselves that are scary, but the reason for their exist-ence. And because our digital minds now give such little import to dusty objects, it is the perverseness of the practice that lives on so vividly, whether or not the documents survive. But part of the precise point of the posture photos is that my body would have never been included. Those boys and girls were photographed, in part because they were part of a dying breed––some of the last of an all-white, white-collar Yale class. Whatever creepy scientific or sociological information was gleaned from those pictures aside, the photographs were prematurely nostalgic. They were relics, of something disappearing, and the obsessiveness of those three decades of posture photography is, in many ways, as
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maudlin and pathetic as it is disturbing. Sontag also understood that “to photograph people is to violate them,” not unlike “a sublimated murder––a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time,” and I agree. It takes a sad and frightened Yale to use its students this way, existing in an indeed sad and frightened time. Because the bodies of others aren’t ours to possess, nor do photographs of naked bodies––even when of perfect, white, wealthy bodies––embalm culture and keep it from disappearing. If those photographs document anything, it’s a misguided understanding of humans. The pictures don’t document a dying breed, but a dying way of thinking, a disturbing manifestation of backwardness. I can imagine what it would be like to take a picture of myself naked at Yale today. I’m in a friend’s apartment, and we spend the two hours prior drinking and discussing the ramifications––emotional and intellectual––of what we’re about to do. Yale’s paying for it all, maybe with a Sudler fund. I imagine taking off my clothes and feeling happy about it. I don’t imagine metal pins or lab-coats, rather a smiling friend
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and a bottle of wine, and feeling self-conscious, but proud and drunk and comfortable. Maybe in some way, at Yale, there always will be a pervasive need to strip down, to look underneath the surface and to document what we find. I doubt that will ever disappear. Importantly, it’s the terms of the stripping down and the ways we do it that will—hopefully—always be in a constant state of change.
Tattoo Series Zach Bell
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Interview with Hannah Whitaker
New York-based photographer Hannah Whitaker studied art at Yale as an undergraduate, before getting an MFA in photography from ICP/Bard. Her photographs address a diverse range of subjects—from nature to still lives to portraiture—and make use of complicated in-camera processes to produce images that are at once representational and abstract. Andrew Wagner met with Hannah in her Brooklyn studio to discuss her time at Yale, her working process, and her love of Duchamp.
so I made a lot of landscapes at night. I did these really tight photographs of car headlamps. I don’t like saying this to undergraduates, but I hate the work that I made as an undergrad, and just cringe thinking about it. But I know that at the time I took it very seriously.
AW: What made you want to go into photography? HW: That, actually, was a really hard decision for me. I was grappling between photography and painting as an undergraduate. I pursued both, simultaneously, until the day I had to decide on a senior thesis. I felt it was already so impractical to be an art major that I might as well embrace a medium that has some practical application in the world. I also thought my photographs were better than my paintings.
What was the transition like from Yale to the ICP/ Bard MFA program? There is an air of intensity to the Yale graduate program that I expected from the ICP/Bard program, because Yale was the only program that I was familiar with. When people prepare for critiques at Yale, they get scared and stay up all night. There’s a terrifying ritual to it. The ICP/Bard program is run by an artist called Nayland Blake, who’s a really interesting installation artist. His pedagogical strategy is different from Yale’s—it’s very supportive and nurturing.
What work were you making as undergraduate? I always was very interested in using a 4x5 camera. I knew, was friends with, and was influenced by a lot of the graduate students, and that just seemed to be the dominant tool that people were using. I had a car,
How did your photography develop while you were at graduate school? From a personal standpoint, it was the first time I made work that was actually satisfying to me. I started to make work that I actually wanted to make. I felt
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capable of finding my own voice for the first time. More specifically, I was really interested in photographers who were working in ways that pushed against the typology and embraced confusion and opacity, like Roe Ethridge, Torbjørn Rødland, and Gil Blank. The idea that photographs could contain degrees of illegibility was foundational to me. I’ve been interested in exploring illegibility in a photograph ever since. What was it like once you graduated? Was it difficult to make work outside of an academic structure? No. I’ve always been very prolific. I’m a very driven person, and I work really hard. In that sense, ever since I left graduate school, I’ve been making photographs at a furious pace. I like working that way and now that I’m able to not have day jobs, it’s much easier to do so. When I first finished graduate school, and for the few years after that, I was just very, very tired—I worked a lot of jobs and made my work in the evenings. What would you say your current photographic process is like now? I’ve been interested recently in thinking of my photo-
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graphic process as a kind of experimental system. I like thinking of it as something defined by a set of rules that I can decide on for myself. The resulting set of images or image is something that conforms and fails to conform to this set of restrictions in various ways. What have you been photographing? What sorts of subjects have you been taking pictures of to explore that experimental process? One thing that I do and have always done is make still lives out of the objects in my life. I’m interested in the recognition you have in the face of a photograph of a common object, and the transformational power that occurs in a photograph of the most mundane, low brow, throw-away thing. You incorporate light leaks often in your work. What led you to purposefully allow light leaks in your photographs? That came about by accident. I had been photographing with my boyfriend’s camera, and for some reason, when I would use his camera I would get light leaks, which was very annoying. I would discard a lot of those
images. But then when I was getting ready for a show in spring of 2012, I returned to some of those images. I became interested in one particular image that I took in an ancient marble quarry the previous summer. There was a tension between the very dominant purple haze over the whole image, and the potential for that image to still bear witness. That’s an internal conflict in any photograph: between the formal or abstract qualities and its potential as a document. So I became interested in exploring that space deliberately.
36 Antipopes, 2013 Two archival pigment prints 40 x 50.5 inches each 35/64
The way I have done it is by putting pin pricks in film screens that I make. Depending on how many pinpricks there are, there will be that many light leaks. Interestingly, people started reading them as quantities. Someone would refer to a photograph as, for example, the one with 18. That was an important realization for me, that a technique like this could actually assign a photograph a quantity. Once it has a quantity it can fit within a mathematical or logical system.
Yes, definitely. That is interesting that you would bring up 1960s conceptualists, because my work is so far removed from them from a visual standpoint. I think about how my work doesn’t have the aesthetic of conceptualism even though it explores a lot of those ideas—like the ontology of the photograph. I do think that my work has a kind of feminine veneer that a lot of these artists would have cringed at. Recently, I’ve found myself looking a lot at decorative arts and quilt making and things like that.
Do you work on one project at a time, or are you doing different projects simultaneously? I’ve always considered myself a photographer who works non-serially, and that was sort of a buzzword in the photo world at one point. I have recently made several bodies of work that I think of as sets of photographs rather than series, because they are a part of a discrete whole that is defined by a particular structure. I like that word because it comes from math.
I also think a lot about Duchamp. Duchamp is an artist who loved toying with people. He loved being simultaneously very logical and then, at the drop of a hat, denying all of these rules he had previously made for himself. He relished the nonsensical in a way that I appreciate. When you look at my work, his influence might be surprising, because he was so dismissive of “retinal” art but he’s a real touchstone for me.
This interest in logic, of using serial logic as a means of making photographs makes me wonder if you are interested in the 1960s photoconceptualism.
Do you think of your photographs as painterly at all? Definitely. My photographs for the past two years have been very planar. The space in them is shallow.
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Focusing on a flatness and defying the three-dimensionality of the photographic comes from an interest in painting. You have said that you are interested in making your photographs illegible. Your use of light often literally obstructs the subject. Is that a strategy to make it more difficult for the viewer to comprehend the photograph? That idea for me is related to vernacular uses of photography, to uses of photography in the media, and to how legible those pictures are. Snapshot pictures and advertising rely on their legibility in order to be useful. There’s a tendency to believe in photographs and to seem to understand their purpose. I’ve often tried to employ the recognizable language of different kinds of photographic strategies while subverting that language at the same time. And I guess you’re right: now I’m sort of doing that in another way. Could you tell me about your recent show in Miami? The show in Miami was at Locust Projects, which is a non-profit that commissions artists to do site-specific
work for them. For that exhibition, I collected litter from the streets of Miami and then furiously made still-lives out of them. I exhibited the work on vinyl adhesive prints, which is a commercial process. I used commercial printers: people who just hit ‘print.’ The photographs themselves were very durable—I put them on the floor and on the walls, and you could walk on them. It was really interesting for me to treat the photograph as the same kind of disposable commodity that you see in the photographs. Finally, what advice do you have for people interested in pursuing photography? I don’t like to give advice, because I don’t really like to receive advice. I can only speak to what has been productive for me—one person’s journey is extremely different from another’s. So who knows if what is applicable to my life is applicable to others. But, my strategy has always been just to work really hard. A lot of artists will only take the opportunities that are the most beneficial to them. I say yes to most things. That’s been a strategy that works for me, to just say yes to everything.
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Wesley Chavis
Green Jesus, 2012
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Saint Mary’s, 2012
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Ben’s Shower, 2012
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Cut at East Rock, 2012
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Invitations
My photographs imply a human presence, though their subject matter is not people: two mannequins, a figure’s bisected shadow, a woman’s back to us, the illuminated windows of a house, the reflection of shoes. I cannot fully explain this impulse towards solitary images (I would call them quiet moments) except that I find myself so wonderfully alone as I look through the camera lens. In the darkroom, I find a similar comfort. In this shadowy place I spend hours alone. My eyes adjust to the dimly lit room. Just as the chemicals seep into my skin, the silence saturates my mind. I develop many versions of one photo, watching the image slowly appear on the paper lying in the chemical-filled metal bin. The moment, halted and preserved by the click of the shutter, reappears on paper. Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography that “the ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: ‘There is the surface. Now think—or feel rather, intuit—what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.’ Photographs, which cannot
Stephanie Wisowaty
themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, fantasy.” I am fascinated by the way my experience of a place can be framed and taken out of context. The mildly surreal, eerie quality invites the viewer to imagine “what is beyond.” I hope the photograph creates a sense of mystery, even to the point of confusion. What are these strange armless figures bathed in white light? How can feet hover over or in water? An unmanipulated photograph documents the physical world as we see it. We trust a photograph to be truthful to this reality. Yet there are ways to question the “real” through reflection and distortion, lighting or skewed perspective. Perhaps this solitary quality of my photos reflects my personal experience of looking through the lens, which creates a separation between myself and my surroundings. The confusing, almost cinematic, or distorted images I capture are a part of daily life, yet I can only find them when my mind is one step removed from the “real,” in a quiet place.
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Stephanie Wisowaty
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Untitled, 2012
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Untitled, 2013
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Editor-in-Chief: Maggie Neil Associate Editors: Devon Geyelin, Sinclaire Marber & Andrew Wagner Design: Jacqi Lee Inside cover art: Ryan Cavataro Special thanks to the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art, the Yale History of Art Department, the Yale Undergraduate Organizations Committee, the Office of the Dean of the Arts, and the Yale Printing and Publishing Services
ya l e center for british art
Sculpture by Nicola Hicks On view through March 9, 2014
1080 Chapel Street, New Haven Tuesday–Saturday 10–5 Sunday 12–5 Admission is free 877 brit art yale.edu/ycba
Nicola Hicks, Who was I Kidding 2011, straw and plaster © Nicola Hicks, photo courtesy Flowers Gallery