Bought a copy of Richard Avedon's In the American West yesterday. I wanted more time with these famous portraits of miners, factory workers, prisoners, drifters, truck drivers, oil field workers, housewives, slaughterhouse workers, carneys. Avedon was lauded for treating these subjects with the same dignity reserved for celebrities and dignitaries as well as criticized for a disparaging view of rural working America. But I am looking for something else in the work, some tension between the ethical and the beautiful I can't seem to shake these days--it has silenced me, my poems--for the portraits are beautiful, but I'm not inclined to trust beauty just now, not my sense of it anyway, which is so often nostaligic and enthused. I am easily moved, and being easily moved seems to do the world an insidious wrong. I am wary, weary.
I see nothing problematic with Avedon's photograph of Warhol's scars which is the artist's turn to artifice, to beauty, to the machine that the artist is even in trauma or especially in trauma, the art object, the object of desire. That's what artists do to themselves sometimes, sometimes at a dear price, but we aren't surprised and we aren't hurt by it anymore than we are hurt by television. I am often moved by television--by commercials in particular--though I know I oughtn't be moved too much.
But these others, these faces in West photographed against blank white paper, removed from their contexts, projected into the artificial white space of the exhibit: they are displaced, but as if they were already displaced, already other, already object in the story that this gaze would have us see. They are transformed from themselves into a point of view. My point of view.
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Reprehensible, yes. But who? Who is reprehensible?
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"A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth."
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The kids are watching Labyrinth. Am noticing this little turn of phrase (gaze?) for the first time:
"Your eyes can be so cruel
Just as I can be so cruel"
What the eyes I. "I can't live within you."
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I can find no way out of seeing wrong.
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