Literary Photographs
Thursday, July 3, 2008 at 10:57AM Laurie Dahlberg writes for the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston's exhibit on Xaviera Simmons:
Although the pictures’ juicy color and vivid camera detail are intensely descriptive (and therefore literal), there is a greater sense in which they evoke language. These are highly condensed images that read epigrammatically; they don’t tell stories as much as they suggest mottos, aphorisms, puns, and declarations.
Simmons' work does "suggest" various phrases, or perhaps more accurately, causes the viewer to respond to the image's suggestiveness with a mantra. See especially Simmon's "Intentional Nigger, aka Robert Beck".
What puzzles me is what Dahlberg means by "epigrammatically." It would help me to know more about her reference to Greenberg, which I don't. So my best bet is to read Dahlberg literally and say, she means the composition of Simmon's images--their spatial organization, geometric forms, color composition, and the gestures and facial expressions of human models--function like words. That is, the sum of visual components "say" something, and specifically they say something that the photographer cannot say with ordinary language or through ordinary storytelling.
This ability to use images to "speak" is what confuses us and makes the photography interesting. We do not mean that the picture of Robert Beck is meant to inform us of something; Simmon is descriptive without being explicit or coercive, like Barthes' spaghetti might be. Instead, the photograph "speaks" by (1) giving us a sufficiently realistic and (2) sufficiently expressive image to respond to, and (3) directing our response to a specific portion of the composition. Thus, our gaze is drawn to Robert Beck's face by the length of his legs (accentuated by the camera angle), the ceiling's imposition on the top of the frame, the negative space between Beck's body and the background (highlighted by the glare and shadow cast by what looks like a single, strong light source), and the curl of his right arm, which then splits our attention between his face and his hand, perhaps causing us to question his "intent".
Simmon's other photos are similarly ordered to direct our attention towards human representations as opposed to structural or figural presentations. Thus, what we are natually left with is a response to the human image (eg. Beck's face and hand), conditioned (or "condensed", to use the word Dahlberg uses) by the visual composition for a viewer's response. Hence, the images do "suggest"--they point us to that which is most expressive and evokes not words but the need for language as such.
I hope I get a chance to see Simmon's work in an exhibit near me.
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