The wonderland of a Parisian art studio….

I’m taking a contemporary danse class this year, with Chloé Bernier. A member of our group, Régis Ecosse, recently filmed one of our classes….here is his great film : « Chloé de 8 à 10″

En janvier, 2012, je fais un stage avec le photo-film festival à Paris, Les Nuits Photographiques. Traductions, diffusion de l’appel à candidature aux pays anglophones….

La 2eme édition de Les Nuits Photographiques se passent au Parc Buttes Chaumont, chaque vendredi soir du juin – de la musique à la DJ La Dame Noir et des projections vidéos.

In January, 2012, I’m doing an internship with the Parisian « picutres-in-motion » festival Les Nuits Photographiques. Translations and communication about the call for applications.

The Second Edition of Les Nuits Photographiques will take place in the Parc Butte Chaumont, every Friday evening in June – music by DJ La Dame Noir et video projections.

Thanks to my job with the web magazine www.lesphotographes.com, I’ve had the great pleasure to interview photographers that I admire. Recently, I’ve been speaking with….

Alexandra De Lapierre – ADELAP - read interview

Ian Paterson – read interview

Michael A. Smith – read interview

En rapport avec la photographie vernaculaire, j’ai interviewé  trois personnes qui sont à la fois des professeurs, des artistes, des collecteurs, des écrivains…..

In connection to vernacular photography, I’ve interviewed three people that are teachers, artists, collectors, writers…

Shawn Michelle Smith – read interview

Barbara Levine – read interview

Geoffrey Batchen - read interview

Lesphotographes.org donne de cours et de stages photo avec de photographes comme…

          Jean-François Bauret

                   Tristan Siegmann

                                Maxime Favier

                                             Rachael Woodson

Lesphotographes.org gives photo classes and workshops with photographers like Jean-François Bauret, Tristan Sigmman, Maxime Favier, Rachael Woodson.

Mon stage de quatre mois a fait que j’ai participer dans la recherche iconographique pour plusieurs livres chez la maison d’édition Gallimard Jeunesse et GEOGuide. J’ai eu le plaisir de travailler principalement avec Anaïck Bourhis, et un peu avec Véronique Masini.

My four-month internship allowed me to participate in the iconographic research for many books at the publishing company Gallimard Jeunesse and GEOGuide. I had the pleasure of working primarily with Anaïck Bourhis and a little with Véronique Masini.

Les livres de Gallimard dans cette photo :
GEOGuide Bourgogne
GEOGuide New York
Découverte des musiciens : Ella Fitzgerald
Folio Junior : Le secret d’Iona
Tothème : Le cinéma
Les Yeux de la Découverte : Les grands monuments de Paris

A paper written for a masters class conducted by François Brunet, at Paris 7

Wisconsin Death Trip: A Critical Analysis

                 -“As a historian, Mr. Lesy is a dramatist.” – Greil Marcus

Widely embraced as a cult classic, though critiqued as dramatic historical research, Michael Lesy’s 1973 book Wisconsin Death Trip raises many questions about the relationship between images and history, while pushing these very boundaries with an alternative presentation. In the following essay, I propose analyzing Lesy’s groundbreaking book, which opens a rich discussion of image theory and art history, with an emphasis on photography.

The book itself was the product of Michael Lesy’s graduate degree research under the guidance of Warren Susman, who subsequently wrote the book’s introduction. Susman justifies Lesy’s work by nestling it in scholarly tradition; Lesy is intellectually related to “a long tradition of striving to know and to understand by a willingness to see things anew.” Seeing the scholarly backlash immediately following the book’s publication, Susman’s comment seemingly forewarns of the potential in Lesy’s work to induce a wide range of reactions.

Lesy strove to write an alternative history, one that used intuition to weave a visual web of the psychology of one town’s inhabitants, circa 1900. Upon the discovery of 3,000 glass plate negatives at the Wisconsin Historical Society, Lesy sought to recreate a historical account of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, as seen through the photographs of photo-journalist Charles Van Shaick. He did not stop at the visuals however; Lesy scoured the Badger State Banner, the local newspaper, for clippings or extracts that he could add to the photos. The book’s organization boils down to a series of numbered sections that begin with a mass of newspaper quotes, coupled with a regrouping of key phrases, followed by a portfolio style group of photographs and collages. Two written pieces act as bookends to this historical content: the introduction and closing remarks written by Lesy.

A (Misleading) Guided Reading…
As readers, we are encouraged to read the text as we would music, and appreciate the images as aesthetic objects. “The text was constructed as music is composed. It was meant to obey its own laws of tone, pitch, rhythm, and repetition. […] These photographs were arranged according to their nature as both records made to order and aesthetic objects created by insight.” Yet more importantly, the author seemingly leaves us free to read the book as we so choose. The lack of page numbers, the photos left to “speak for themselves” without any titles or direct explication, blocks of quotes displayed as if we too were discovering them for the first time; all is arranged as if Lesy is presenting us with a box of goodies and it’s our treat to sort through them, and play with whatever ideas we want. It appears, at first, as through we are left to draw our own conclusions about the photos and text.

This freedom, however, is just a loosely veiled illusion. Lesy invites us to look at photos in any way we want, explains Judith Gutman, but then limits our viewpoint. “He checks our vision and funnels it into the book’s frame.” Lesy does indeed guide our visual interpretation of images in two important ways. First, Lesy employs juxtaposition as a tool of creating links between two or more photos. Without a guiding verbal narrative, the layout of images becomes primordial in reading the book. Susman loosely equated Lesy’s process to Walter Benjamin’s quotation style: “…tearing fragments out of their context and arranging them afresh in such a way that they illustrated one another….” This can be applied to both Lesy’s work with texts and images; he removes their original context and places it into a new one.

When viewed alone, many of the photos evoke pleasant connotations. Take for example, the photograph of a young girl, seated in boat floating on a gentle stream.  Positioned at the back of the rowboat, she casually holds up a fistful of flowers, whose stems run downwards, back into the water from which they were pulled.  She is the only person pictured and the trees around her intimate a tranquil harmony with nature.
Lesy juxtaposes this serene moment with a rather chilling photograph: a woman, standing outdoors, draped with snakes (at least three) across her chest, and laughing. Also involving a natural element, here the woman is pictured as above the tree line, larger than the forest, imposing herself and the snakes in our view. Behind her, a bench has been knocked over, and despite her modest ankle-length skirt, long-sleeved shirt and flowered hat (all implying her adherence to social standards) her facial expression, coupled with her almost playful hold on the serpents, evoke an uneasiness for the viewer.

How are we meant to understand the conversation between these two photos? For me, snakes often swim through rivers and lakes, and thus, as I look at this page layout, I quickly project the snakes from the right hand picture into the river on the left. I see their winding bodies mirrored in the curves of a stream. Overall, an agitated feeling imposes itself, as the tranquility of the stream is overturned by the anxious excitement of the second photo.

Lesy acknowledged that certain photographs in the book are perfectly joyful, or at least more neutral. “These images of death are within a flow of images with other meanings in addition to suffering and death.” However, he fails to recognize that the repeated presence of such “images of death” tilt the overall reading towards a darker perspective. The whole ensemble becomes ominous, which I believe was the desired effect, when accompanied with the newspaper excerpts.

The second way Lesy guides our reading revolves around photos that were manipulated or visually played with by the author. His collages, cropping, doubling, or zooming effects also create a general feeling of unease. School group portraits, for example, display a small girl in the middle, who has been singled out by Lesy: a thick, black line encircles her. There is also a slight backwards zoom effect, where Lesy has cropped the photo at certain point and superimposed the inner part a little bit smaller than the outer rim. These two effects visually distance us from the girl at the center, but also highlight her as the most important element. The black circle also has a somewhat sinister effect; it’s as if Lesy is trying to say “She’s next in line for death,” – identifying her for future unhappiness or doom. Without the circle and the backwards-zooming effect, this innocuous class photo would blend in perfectly well with any “normal” group portrait.
In this book, photographic juxtaposition and manipulation work to create a sort of conversation between the photos. As W.J.T Mitchell wrote: “Like people, pictures may not know what they want; they have to be helped to recollect it through a dialogue with others.” Lesy clearly understood and emphasized this dialogue to impart his visual intuition and historical account.

We could carry this same critique beyond the photographic conversation and into the textual element of Lesy’s book, simply by looking at the first page of each text section. These literary sections are regroupings of quotations pulled from the local newspaper, organized by year, and Lesy has positioned of box in the center of page, which highlights words, or phrases, of particular interest. The first line, pictured here, reads “Sudden baby death Sad insanity”. Lesy is drawing our attention to the darker happenings in Black River Falls. Once again, we’re left to peruse the pages, but Lesy is also guiding this reading.
These visual and textual examples exemplify Gutman’s earlier critique, which claimed Lesy funnels our viewing. Reading Lesy’s book can be quite confusing in the sense that the reader feels an initial freedom of interpretation, but is actually guided by Lesy who has molded a very particular visual path that is meant to be followed. This becomes problematic when considering the traditional historical context in which Lesy’s research is compared; the book is a rather biased presentation of the “facts.”

Visual Historicity and Historiography
In the midst of analyzing W.D.T, I attended a lecture given by Art Historian and Yale Professor Alexander Nemerov. Following his discussion on the “connections“ between his father’s poetry and his aunt Diane Arbus’ photography, I was frustrated with what I felt where weak links, as if he were grasping at straws to connect two completely independent artists. Immediately following that, I read Nemerov’s article Seeing Ghosts, which explained his academic approach. “Can an unprofessional method born of intuition and sentiment (hardly a method at all) somehow yield a valid insight about the past?” Though satisfied to learn there was a process behind his alternative method, I still struggle with the legitimacy of this approach to history. But putting these personal frustrations aside, there are commonalities between Nemerov and Lesy’s scholarly approach that might help enlighten our understanding of W.D.T and the feedback it received in the 1970s.

Critics, at the time Lesy’s book was published, also struggled with his innovative style. Susan Sontag, in particular, harshly tore apart any visual-textual dialogue Lesy might have felt existed: “The quotations have nothing to do with the photographs but are correlated with them in an aleatoric, intuitive way…” Sontag is correct in claiming that the photographs originally had nothing to do with the newspaper quotes, but Lesy wasn’t concerned with the original context of the pictures or words; for him, their geographical and temporal elements necessarily worked together to show the underlying troubles of the town folk, or even of a national crisis.

Sontag continues with her critique, demonstrating her comparison of Lesy’s new approach with that of tradition historiography: « Of course, Wisconsin Death Trip doesn’t actually prove anything. The force of its historical argument is the force of collage. To Van Schaick’s disturbing, handsomely time-eroded photographs Lesy could have matched other texts from the period – love letters, diaries – to give another, perhaps less desperate impression. His book is rousing, fashionable pessimistic polemic, and totally whimsical as history. »

Her mentality that a historical study must prove something demonstrates traditional approaches in scholarly studies before Lesy. This is the same sentiment that is evoked when reading Nemerov’s work – I found myself asking “So what? I see the connections he is trying to make, and they are amusing, but what do they prove?”  In the end, like Sontag wrote, they don’t prove anything. They suggest a feeling, one outlook. In their defense, both Lesy and Nemerov present their work as a history, i.e. just one version of events and not the history.  This specifically selected indefinite article is significant because it permits the reader to accept or refuse their versions as possible histories and to explore other interpretations. They both desire to make connections between different sources based on an intuition, in order to create an alternative history.

To better understand why Lesy and Nemerov’s alternative histories are unsettling, it seems important to draw some attention to two categories within history: historiography and historicity. Historiography emphasizes the generally accepted methods of historical scholarship, whereas historicity is concerned primarily with historical authenticity. Here, it is important to see how each of these traditional elements was threatened by Lesy and Nemerov’s style.

Photography & Death
“The book provides no links between the questions the people in the photographs raise and the facts the newspapers provide. In the absence of those links, the book’s design takes over and imposes present-day thoughts about death.” – Judith Gutman

While exploring recurring themes in W.D.T, the most obvious is a broad inclination for the somber, the ominous, and death related visuals. Photography is no stranger to death, so to speak, and there has been ample literature written about their interactions. Sontag herself dedicated a chapter, “Melancholy Objects,” in her famous book to the subject. “Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people.” Evoking a ghost-like presence that haunts the viewer, Sontag claims that people in photographs are the element that forms a correlation with death.

In his overview of visual culture, Nicholas Mirzeoff also set aside space for a discussion of photography and death, but oriented it towards a broader inclusivity. Mirzeoff walks us through the beginning of photography and the 1840 photograph by Hippolyte Bayard, Self-portrait of a Drowned Man, where Bayard poses as a corpse having committed suicide after his invention of photography was “stolen.” We’re also presented with the work of Eugène Atget, who extensively photographed the streets of Paris at the turn of the 20th century. Here, Mirzeoff shows the suggestiveness of a photograph of a place. He selects a photograph of the Mur des Férérés (1871) to demonstrate that pictures of place can also connote death, if a sordid affair took place at that location, as it did during the Paris Commune of 1871. “Photography defined the new border between life and death as a capturing of light that paradoxically survived death even as it reminded the viewer of it.”

A Cult Classic
Having been recommended W.D.T on multiple occasions throughout my studies, I considered the book to have a certain cult following and online searches confirmed this belief. Lesy’s book has seeped into mass culture and influence musical bands, poets, photographers, and film directors.

In 1999, James Marsh released the film version of W.D.T. Imbuing the film with images drawn directly from, or loosely inspired by the book, Marsh is also hunting for that elusive intuition factor. Writer and critic Greil Marcus summarizes: “Mr. Marsh’s “Wisconsin Death Trip” is less a film of Mr. Lesy’s book than a quiet reinhabitating of the world it found, or made. ‘In a way the book is unfilmable,’ says Mr. Marsh.”

We might ask ourselves why this book became the cult classic that it has. One possibility is presented when Marcus equates Van Schaick’s photographs with those of a more contemporary photographer: “Mr. Lesy made a montage, using items from the local paper, contemporaneous regional fiction and poetry, asylum records and the photographs left by Van Schaick, who in Mr. Lesy’s pages emerges as Arbus’s unknown ancestor.” It was indeed “Mr. Lesy’s” montage that would make Van Schaick’s photography appear to be somehow a forerunner for Arbus, but the visual comparison is interesting for what it suggests about the cult aspect; for Dian Arbus’ photographs are nothing if not cult.

Continuing along with our question, W.J.T Mitchell’s notion of “image anxiety” might offer some insight into the notion of cult or iconic images. Citing two photographs, one of Dolly, the cloned sheep, and the second of the World Trade Center being attacked, Mitchell writes: “The potency of these images doesn’t reside merely in their presentness or topical currency but in their status as enigmas and omens, harbingers of uncertain futures.” The same might be said for the images and image-relationships built by Lesy; the combinations become “harbingers of uncertain futures.” Lesy’s images create anxiety that might lend itself to the creation of a cult status. The images become recognizable omens, or in the case of W.D.T., perhaps the whole book becomes the omen.

That said, however, I don’t believe that we can talk about an image anxiety in the town of Black River Falls, circa 1900, in the same way that Mitchell does in the present day. It is highly probable that Lesy either projected his 1970’s image culture onto the Van Schaick photographs, or that, even more likely, he projected his reading of the Badger State Banner newspaper onto the photos. Either way, I think Lesy was the creator of the book’s image anxiety, and not the population depicted. Regardless, this idea could open doors to discussion about how scholars read and analyze historical images. Can we ever, with our modern eyes, look back on such photos and properly gauge their meanings?

Conclusion
We saw briefly above how Michael Lesy went about visually creating his alternative history and the friction it met with based on traditional conceptions of historicity and historiography. Nonetheless, these critiques did not harm the book’s eventual acceptance as a cult classic and scholarly reference.

To conclude, I propose a reanalysis of Wisconsin Death Trip that encourages future readers to conceive of Lesy not as a strict historian, but rather as an artist who relied on history to analyze the human psychology of a given period. The book, therefore, should be approached as an artistic product of a visually rich historical interpretation.

In the spirit on encouragement, I’ll force myself out of my comfort zone and suggest that even though the field of intuitive historiography, as channeled through the visual arts, is not expanding in leaps and bounds, the continuing scholarly work by Nemerov’s is something to follow with open interest, accepting it as different, but something that offers new insight nonetheless.

Bibliography
Ball, Duane E. Review Untitled. The Journal of Economic History. Vol. 34, No. 2 (Jun. 1974),
pp. 509-510. JSTOR:  http://www.jstor.org/stable/2117001.
Danbom, David. “Review: Untitled.” Agricultural History. Vol. 48, No. 4. (Oct., 1974), pp. 603-
604. JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3741404.
Gutman, Judith Mara. “Reading Pictures.” Reviews in American History. Vol. 1, No. 4 (Dec.
1973), pp. 488-492. The Johns Hopkins University Press. JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2701710.
Lesy, Michael. Wisconsin Death Trip. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1973.
Levine, Robert M. “Semiotics for the Historian: Photographers as Cultural Messengers.”
Reviews in American History, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Sep. 1985), pp. 380-385. JSTOR:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2702093.

Marcus, Greil. “A Record of Despair Born of a Single Image.” The New York Times Sunday, Nov. 28, 1999.
Mitchell, W.J.T. What do pictures want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago University Press, Chicago, 2005.
Nemerov, Alexander. “What is Research in the Visual Arts? Obsession, Archive Encounter.” Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, 2008.
Lecture “Diane Arbus et Howard Nemerov : Une resemblance,” INHA, November 21, 2011.
Normand, Tom. Scottish Photography: A History. Luath Press Limited, Edinborough. 2007.
Peters, Marsha and Bernard Mergen. ““Doing the Rest”: The Uses of Photographs in American Studies.” American Quarterly. Vol. 29, No. 3, 1977. pp. 280-303. JSTOR
Raphael, Timothy. Oxford Magazine – Blog. “ Memento Mori”

http://www.orgs.muohio.edu/oxmag/2006/essays/raphael_memento.html

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Picador, New York, 1973.
“Wisconsin Death Trip” Official website of the 1999 film: http://www.wisconsindeathtrip.com/reviews.html
“Wisconsin Death Trip.” YOUTUBE video, posted May 22, 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voKdxD07PgE

Un projet photo personnel : « In the Beginning » : un livre (fait avec Blurb) de photos de mes grand-parents, Opal et Eddie. De photos de leur première année passé ensemble – la rencontre jusqu’au mariage…

A personal photo project: « In the Beginning » : a book (made with Blurb) of photos of my grandparents, Opal and Eddie. Photos of their first year spent together – from their first meeting to the wedding…

Masters in Visual Culture, 1st year Thesis, Université Denis Diderot.  »(Un)Common Viewpoints: An Overview of Vernacular Group Photography. » 2011.

Excerpt of Introduction:

…“John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s greatest contribution was to reintroduce Americans to their vernacular landscape, to teach them to see again – and in a new light – the common elements of roads, houses, yards and towns.”  In reading about how to think about cultural landscapes, I began to reflect on my own home and cultural background, wondering if it was possible to learn something new from the familiar. The following research project will investigate the vernacular photography of Icelandic immigrants and their descendents in North America. The project is of a rather personal nature: my paternal grandfather grew up within such an immigrant family speaking Icelandic in Mountain, North Dakota. This genealogy makes me 1/4 Icelandic and so telling the story of this group of people is, in a way, telling my own story. J.B. Jackson’s work has, however, encouraged me to take a step back from my own culture and try to analyze it with a fresh perspective. »

Please contact me to read more…

Handmade projects