Heir Apparent (from page 1) sophisticated dialogue to address clinical, cultural, political, and aesthetic questions and controversies that are pertinent to psychoanalytic clinicians and other communities engaged in our field. In this inaugural issue of my editorship, I am grateful for the assistance of Jamieson Webster, who generously served as guest issue editor. This issue was inspired by the 51st Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association, which addressed the topic of femininity. To address femininity is to evoke the question of difference, which is intrinsic
to the psychoanalytic field and its practice. Psychoanalytic thinking, arguably, has always been a way of thinking of the maladies of the discontent with difference, whether through repression, disavowal, expulsion. Feminism, critical theory, and postcolonial studies have revealed the psychic and material coupling of the repudiation of femininity and other marks of difference, whether they be race, class, or other representatives of the social abject. As a practice of speaking the unthinkable, psychoanalysis is one antidote among others to the erasure of the other, though it has not been exempted from the ailments of group psychology. Despite longstanding
attempts to define the commonality of psychoanalysis as theory and technique, the field remains unyieldingly multifarious. The sustaining of a space for such differences to be exchanged and contested without leaning on diluted appeals to standardization and sameness has been the bedrock of DIVISION/Review, and perhaps of psychoanalytic ethics itself. z REFERENCES Freud, S. (1955). Totem and taboo. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 13, pp.1-164). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1913) Freud, S. (1964). An outline of psycho-analysis. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 23, pp.139208). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1938)
Photography of Jane Bown A review by Tim Maul Jane Bown: A Lifetime of Looking By Jane Bown (edited by Luke Dodd) London, England: Guardian Faber, 2015 Exposures By Jane Bown (edited by Luke Dodd) London, England: Guardian Books, 2009 The light administrative duties (downloading files, having welcome exchanges with my London-based curator/editor friend Luke Dodd) required to curate this issue of DIVISION/Review cannot detract from the gravity and honor of introducing Jane Bown’s (1925-2014) images to a highly specific audience such as ours. Although little known on this side of the Atlantic, Bown is familiar to older readers of London’s The Observer with her portraiture and reportage growing in reputation as the specialized role of photojournalist becomes redundant in the continued democratization of the imaging device or camera. A “Wren” (Women’s Royal Naval Service) during World War II, Bown’s life path was radically diverted by wedding photography and she was soon contributing to the The Observer in that black and white postwar decade of deprivation, enforced austerity, and delayed PTSD on a national level. There is a brief scene in the 2017 film Phantom Thread where the neurotic fashion designer played by Daniel Day Lewis is photographed gazing upon his most recent muse in a bustling Cecil Beaton-esque studio of the same period. Bown operated in an opposite world. Her portraiture had a job to do and a deadline to meet, necessitating immediate productive encounters with limited access to her subjects, a “who’s who” of politics, entertainment, literature, and other cultural personages. Bown acknowledged that her conventional appearance and mild manner allowed her subjects to drop their reserve
and to give her what she needed, unlike our Diane Arbus, who disliked commercial assignments and psychically exhausted her sitters into submission. Bown was beloved by many. Andy Warhol’s assistant in the 1960s and the Factory doorman poet/photographer Gerard Malanga (while not quite in Bown’s league) stated that rather than taking an image, one is given it by the subject, an exchange continually recognized in reviewing Bown’s extensive corpus. I am personally intrigued by the mythic characters that populated Londons debauched 1950s bohemia, which Bown, both the insider, and the outsider documented. The Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon was the only assignment that frightened her unlike queer icon Quentin Crisp (I met him once, we talked about Boy George, another Bown sitter), the libertine grandson of you-know-who, painter Lucien Freud; and Britain’s forgotten “answer” to the Hollywood bombshell, Diana Dors. The momentum picks up in the 1960s with the young nicotine addicted Beatles, goggle-eyed artist David Hockney, and the elfin Rita Tushingham star of the kitchen-sink drama A Taste Of Honey (1962) and soon after Richard Lester’s kooky The Knack and How To Get It (1965), both films in gritty black and white. Bown continually reminds us that prior to social media and the iPhone, the liminal intimate physical encounter required an agreement, like being vaccinated, brief and mostly painless, opening a fleeting window of trust, which Bown could summon on a daily basis. Everyone looks their age. We are provided a good hard look at someone that either confirms or contributes knowledge to our formed opinion of them. In public life, it helps when an individual knows how they appear and can send whichever signal needs to be transmitted or 3
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performed through what critic Max Kozloff called “‘the theatre of the face’.” Models, actors, and public figures have it while the rest us can acquire it over time or learn it via a media consultant. Moving someone closer to a window in light-deprived London may have had a sedating effect upon Bown’s subjects. One cannot imagine improvising a studio shoot and ordering around a Samuel Beckett, Edna O’Brien, Rudolf Nureyev, or a wary Bernadette Devlin the activist and former Mid Ulster MP, here in a skirt she knitted in prison. Bown’s London has passed, but with Brexit done, the exportation of a one-dimensional Britishness feels more urgent than ever, and PBS watcher that I am, I remain struck by the plethora of bonnet romances, cozy murder mysteries (exceptions: Prime Suspect, Shetland) and monarchy-centered docudramas coming our way. Perhaps they are simply cheaper to license. Jane Bown’s achievement offers an antidote to much of this, consider her image of the elderly former Blackshirt pinup girl Lady Diana Mosley smiling tolerantly like Norman Bates in the final scene of Psycho (1960). She wouldn’t hurt a fly but Bown, unusually so, maintains her distance. z REFERENCES Aird, C., Collins, E., & Bartlett, K. (Executive producers). (2013-present). Shetland [TV series]. ITV Studios. Anderson, P. T. (Director). (2017). Phantom thread [Film]. Annapurna Pictures; Ghoulardi Film Company; Perfect World Pictures. Bown, J. (2009). Exposures (Luke Dodd, Ed.). London, England: Guardian Books. Bown, J. (2015). Jane Bown: A lifetime of looking (Luke Dodd, Ed.). London, England: Guardian Faber. Head, S. (Executive producer). (1991-2006). Prime suspect [TV series]. Granada Television/ITV Productions; WGBH Boston/Masterpiece Mystery. Hitchcock, A. (Director). (1960). Psycho [Film]. Shamley Productions. Lester, R. (Director). (1965). The knack...and how to get it [Film]. Woodfall Film Productions. Richardson, T. (Director). (1961). A taste of honey [Film]. Woodfall Film Productions.
