Micro- and macrocosms have been imagined for centuries, but for all but a few unique individuals-Lu- cretius, Leeuwenhoek, Gali- these visions remained vaporous abstractions. In the mid 19th century came the invention of photography with its ability to capture these and make them con- crete; finally, a much-needed language, both visual and verbal, was able to develop. Now in the late 20th century we find ourselves in the position of using this language to judge virtually everything we see.
It is so easy to forget how greatly our perception has altered as a result of photography. It is also easy to overlook how much our knowledge has been augmented through the application of photography to the recording of extrasensory aspects of the universe: things too small or too distant to see with the naked eye. It is particularly in this application that photographs in 1981 still have the power to confuse us, educate us, and make us appreciate the pow- of the camera, which we tend to take for granted.
Yet in the hands of the art- ist, what are the limits of photography? How far can it be stretched before it is unrecog- as photography? Artists have been flirting with the “expansion” of photography for decades, even before it was generally held to be a fine Most recently, the Photo-Realists have faithfully painted the world as captured and transformed by the photograph; Rauschenberg used photo-mechanical processes to create his large-scale Hoarfrost series, and Warhol has used photography and photo processes extensively. But only Chuck Close, by blowing photographs to vast sizes and turning them into paintings via a three-color separation procedure, has come close to exploring the ultimate limits of what the “classic” (i.e., fine-grain, black-and- photograph can effect.
Even more rare is an artist who makes traditional photographs yet presents them in a way that they cease to be photographs,or more precisely, so that they cease to be images that are coherent in thelanguage of photography spoken in the art world. Chicago photographer Jane Wenger is exploring this area,the limits ot photography, in her latest body of work. Hers is an interesting search and her background an interesting record of the search.
Wenger’s earliest (1972) body of work, undertaken after a B.F.A. from Alfred University and study at Chicago’s· prestigious Institute of Design, clearly is similar to that of Bill Brandt. However, she seemed not to be copying him in the way that a student, lacking both inspiration and life experience, copies the master. Her reclining nudes on a beach are photographed feet first, so that the human body is revealed as only the camera can reveal it: without foreshortening, distorted by the lens; huge feet lead to big ankles to small legs and a tiny upper body. Brandt’s similar studies were photographed in such a way that the distorting power ot the lens was exploited to create a final image that was surreal, even ironic. Wenger seemed rather to be straightforwardly using the camera to explore how the human body appears in space through the lens.
Perhaps too young and inexperienced to comment on the world in her images, she simply explored it. The nude in the landscape luckily proved, however, to be the image through which she could best express herself, for her subsequent work continued to feature this subject matter. A series dubbed “The Extended Arms” transformed a male nude into landscape when she laid her model, face turned away, against the sky. She continued the utilization of the body as landscape in her next series, “The Bald Head,” wherein a bald man (always with the face averted) posed against sky and water in a dramatic, primal set of images.
Wenger next produced a series, “Faces,” that left utilizing the body-as-landscape and created a “landscape of the body.” Working with a macro lens, she now shoved her camera in her subjects’ faces, capturing every pore, hair, wrinkle, and blemish. The photographs in this series are actually nerve- racking. The viewer, on discovering that these images are not “private parts” (which it at first seems they might be), is relieved yet still remains repulsed because, in any case, he is seeing too much. Skin seems to be agonizingly stretched, mouths and eyes become monstrous orifices. The body, rendered in a detail our naked eye cannot see, becomes, through the camera, a visual instrument of oppression, almost a metaphor for the dark side of man and the ugliness and evil of which man is capable.
These photographs were the result of shooting sessions in a Los Angeles gym. Her subjects were weightlifters. Electrified by the ambience of the gym, Wenger tried to capture it as fully as she could with her camera and by making a tape recording of the grunts of the men and the clanging of their weights. The experience of capturing the images for the “Faces” series led to Jane Wenger’s most recent work: an environmental installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The photographs of sections of weightlifters’ faces were blown up to massive sizes—some 4 x 4 feet, others 4 x 6 feet—and a highly manipulated tape of the sounds from the gym was created to complement the murals. In an attempt to control the viewer’s experience of the work as much as possible, Wenger built a room within the gallery, painted it black, and arranged the lighting in such a way that each of the ten images was individually lit, while the room remained very dark. A total environment was created. The huge photographs were certainly the most prominent aspect of her work. However, they could no longer be perceived as simply photographs. The images themselves remained quite pristine. Aside from being much enlarged, they had not been manipulated or altered in any way. Yet, they had been transformed. The sound and the presentation were sufficient to alter the viewer’s perception, turning these basic, traditional photographs into images that seemed naked and ‘language-less’ in a most disturbing way. The recognizable categorization of the photograph within the art context had suddenly been eluded.
Aside from the powerful content of the pieces—attraction to well-crafted work, repulsion from the subject matter, seduction of the womb-like environment, oppression of the sound, and the uncertainty of the ambiance—Wenger’s installation raised a thicket of questions about the nature of photography in contemporary art. Thought about photography in the art context is often confined, and it takes an artist like Wenger, who uses the classic black-and-white print in such an adventurous way, to reveal just how limited it actually is. More than any other artist working today, Jane Wenger is creating work that functions as a ‘lens’ through which inquiries into the nature of photography in contemporary art might be seen and answered. (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, January 31–March 22)
Lynne Warren