This blogpost is derived from an essay for Professor Slifkin’s class “Photography and Facticity,” Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, fall 2012.
Allen Ginsberg,“Now Jack as I warned you far back as 1945, if you keep going home to live with your ‘Memère’ you’ll find yourself wound tighter and tighter in her apron strings till you’re an old man and can’t escape…” William Seward Burroughs camping as an André Gide-ian sophisticate lecturing the earnest Thomas Wolfean All-American youth Jack Kerouac who listens soberly dead-pan to “the most intelligent man in America” for a funny second’s charade in my living room 206 East 7th Street Apt 16, Manhattan, one evening Fall 1953, 1953. Gelatin silver print, printed 1984–97, 11 1/8 x 17 3/8 in. (28.3 x 44.2 cm). National Gallery of Art, Gift of Gary S. Davis © 2012 Allen Ginsberg LLC. All rights reserved.
Ginsberg was impressed by Goldberg’s manipulation of text and photography, and looked to other artists who similarly engaged with the medium. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Duane Michals had begun exploring narrative structures in photography through the addition of text and the use of sequential images, creating an unfolding photo-story. Widely acknowledged as the pioneer of this representational mode, Michals addressed in his works the dichotomy between reality and appearance, and the passage of time. In many of these photo-texts, Michals explored the tension between the facade presented in the photograph and the truth revealed in the writing. Declaring his role as a short-story writer, Michals separated himself from contemporary photo “reporters,” creating complex and multi-layered works of art that challenge our perception of the photograph as a vehicle of truth.
In the work A Letter from My Father, 1975,
(http://zoom.mfa.org/fif=sc1/sc196488.fpx&obj=iip,1.0&wid=568&cell=568,427&cvt=jpeg) for example, Michals brackets the photograph with an intimate and melancholic tale that almost relegates the photograph to secondary importance. Using a technique that Ginsberg would later appropriate, Michals chooses to inscribe the caption in his own handwriting, imbuing the already confiding text with greater familiarity. The viewer’s feeling of privileged access to this writing is compounded by the deeply exposed tone of the text. Lamenting the lack of affection between himself and his father, the writer reveals, “I never found that place where he had hidden his love.” This introspective, reflective quality is repeated throughout Michals’s photo-texts, but he never reveals the identity of the narrator, purposely bewildering the viewer and challenging our assumptions about the identity of the author.
The relationship between text and image in Michals’s work is often complex; it is sometimes unclear how a caption relates to its corresponding photograph. In some cases, Michals added the descriptive text fifteen years after taking the photograph, revealing that the two modes of expression were not necessarily conceived together. In pairing text and image, however, Michals encourages the viewer to read into the significance of the work beyond what can be gleaned from the photograph alone. By providing the viewer with supplementary information through the text, Michals hints that what is understood from the surface of the work is but a fraction of its full intention. “The things that cannot be seen are the most significant,” Michals wrote. “They cannot be photographed, only suggested.” Through writing on his photographs, Michals intended to make his images sacred and impossible to replicate. The captions are “a trail I’ve left behind, clues, strange marks made, that prove I was one here,” said Michals, his particular correlation of text and image functioning as an indelible trace of his personal touch.
It was Michals’s personal style of text that so attracted Ginsberg and lingered in his mind as he turned to photography once more in the early 1980s. Primarily a poet, novelist, and social activist, and famous for his involvement in the Beat movement of the 1950s and early 1960s, Ginsberg initially took photographs to document the rebellious Beats and to capture “epiphanous moments” in the lives of such close friends as Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. Casting aside his camera in the mid-1960s, Ginsberg rediscovered his snapshots almost two decades later and reprinted the images, inscribing captions directly on the photographs. Despite approaching photography as a student of literature, Ginsberg’s photo-texts share numerous similarities with Michals; Ginsberg drew on Michals’s use of text to allude to information not readily available in the photograph, thus investing the image with greater complexity and meaning.
To be continued...
--Written by Eleanor Stoltzfus, M.A. Candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, and Graduate Intern, Grey Art Gallery