“So often, when you see an interesting face, and you go up to it with a camera, it changes instantly: their eyes meet your eyes, and a mask appears. Or there’s self-consciousness, an awareness of how they want to present themselves. Whatever it is, there’s a change. Sometimes it’s humongous. It’s always big. It’s always too big as far as I’m concerned. So I chose people who were doing something that was intense enough so that my presence wasn’t going to change it. Which it didn’t.”
Photographer Jane Wenger is referring to the men pictured in a series of mural-sized portraits, the largest she has ever made, that are mounted on the walls of a narrow, low-ceilinged, black-painted room of her own design. The men are obviously involved in some strenuous activity. The face of one is distorted in a grimace of pain: the eyes tightly shut, the teeth clenched. The gasping mouth of another is outlined by a wide band of foamy white spittle. A third has dug his chin deep into his chest for leverage.
What is striking about the pictures, however, is not so much that they are candid shots of men absorbed in a physical task, but that they are so big and show such close-up views. Wenger has cropped the prints so that it seems the camera was too near to fit whole faces into the pictures. Instead, a four-by-five-foot photo is filled entirely by, say, a mouth and a chin; or a nose, a mouth, and a chin; or a single, slyly glancing eye.
“There are two things a smart photographer should realize about his audience,” Wenger says. “One is, consciously or subconsciously, they have to think, ‘Where was the person who took these pictures? What could be going on that that photographer could be there? How close was the photographer?’
“The other thing is that people believe photographs are true. Because (these photographs) are so segmented, you can never know what the truth is, but I’m sure people will look at this and believe something. I want to use that.”
Indeed, it is possible to imagine that any of a number of things is happening. When you step into Jane Wenger’s dark, womblike room, an environmental installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, not only do you see the photographs, but from somewhere nearby come the sounds of breathing—the sudden, sharp exhalation of held breaths; deep grunts of effort; short, fast pants, sighs of satisfaction. Perhaps the men are being tortured; perhaps they are exercising; perhaps they are making love.
Wenger shot the photos about two years ago, and a friend recorded the sounds at the same time. But Wenger put the tape aside. “I thought the sounds were just as ambiguous and intriguing as the pictures were, but I had no idea what I was going to do with them.”
Last spring, Wenger showed 16-by-20-inch prints of the pictures in an exhibition at the Landfall Gallery. “I mounted them on a big board, hung in a very classic way. I had been definitely moving toward an installation, and when I hung this show I considered it to be finished. I considered the installation to be the finished piece.” Then, about four or five days after her opening, she “remembered the tape and got it out to listen. I was at Circle (the University of Illinois, where she teaches), in the film room, when I was listening to the sound, and there was a lot of other noise: people walking by and so forth. So I closed the door, turned out the lights, and closed my eyes, so I could concentrate.” Suddenly, the idea of the new installation came to her as a piece. “I saw the photographs as big pieces, I saw them in a dark room, and I heard the sound coming from… I couldn’t tell where. Then I knew what the piece was.”
Realizing the installation, however, was not quite so easy. Wenger had never made huge photographs before, and when she started experimenting with a few test prints—working with a friend who had a darkroom larger than her own—she soon discovered that there are some special problems involved. She didn’t want to spend $250 for a roll of photographic mural paper, so she raided a spare box of 11-by-14-inch paper—a size she hardly ever uses—and made three-by-four-foot mosaics with the rectangular sheets, attaching them to the darkroom wall with pushpins. She used a mirror device to project her negatives’ images onto the wall, and her early test prints came out backwards, because she hadn’t stopped to think that the mirror would flip the images.
She also had trouble learning to refine her mural-sized prints. Like a lot of photographers, Wenger does considerable “burning” and “dodging” on her prints. “I always say there are good printers and good negative makers. I am a good printer; I’m a lousy negative maker. My negatives are just barely good enough: I do a song-and-dance in the darkroom.” To bring out the highlights and preserve grades of contrast in her “lousy” negatives, Wenger lets extra light fall on a portion of the paper while the rest is dark (burns), or blocks the light from a certain area of the paper while the rest is being exposed (dodges). “So my prints look like I have beautiful negatives. There’s no question about it. I have a very sharply attuned eye.”
But these printing techniques can become quite complicated when you’re making four-by-five-foot prints. As the distance from negative to paper increases, the light gets dimmer and dimmer according to a formula related to the square of the distance. Thus, the exposure time must be exponentially increased to make up for the weaker light. “To make a 16-by-20 print (from her original 35mm negatives),” Wenger says, “I only have to expose for maybe a minute to a minute and a half. Then maybe I’ll burn an area for two or three minutes longer.” The larger prints, however, required an exposure of “something like 64 minutes.” All the while, of course, the intense white light of the enlarger is shining on the plastic negative. “And then how do you burn the other areas in? You can’t do it,” Wenger said. “I burned out my negatives.”
Finally, she took her 16-by-20 prints to K&S Photographics, which made eight-by-ten-inch negatives from them. With these negatives, the exposure for the mural prints was reduced to about 70 seconds. Wenger began printing happily away. When she was done, she edited the sound tape from 25 minutes to its present 7 minutes and mounted the prints.
Jane Wenger walks over to a mural photo that features a large, fleshy upper lip. She stretches her hand to it and makes a grabbing motion. She lets out a throaty, animal sound. “Rrrawwrgh. Those lips are so wet and soft. Sexuality is such a large part of photography, because it is a reflection of the way things are in the world. Society is sexual. SYM. Sexual. Society is 8 and the individual is M. That shows up so much in photography.”
She asks what I think of the picture, and I say I’m a little repulsed. She nods. “I wanted to make it so hard for you to be in here that you almost wouldn’t be able to be in here. Yet I wanted it to be so compelling that you couldn’t really leave either. I wanted that push-pull. I’ve always wanted that with my work.”
I asked her what the pictures are of. She shakes her head. “They’re not posed,” she says. “Aside from that, I’m definitely not into telling the audience what’s going on. To let people know what it is is to lessen the effect. As soon as people know, they can put it away. They can say, ‘Oh, yes. This is this.’ ‘That explains that.’ And then they don’t have to feel anything. Fuck that.”
— Kevin Johnson