The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson: Secret Agents, Private I

Composing with Images: Lynn Hershman’s Photography

COMPOSING WITH IMAGES: LYNN HERSHMAN’S PHOTOGRAPHY GLENN KURTZ Imagemanipulationhasaccompaniedphotographythroughoutitshistoryastherepressedaccompanies consciousness. In 1839 Daguerre announced that the daguerreotype “is a chemical and physical process which gives [nature] the power to reproduce herself.”1 Every subsequent claim for photography’s objectivity reproduces Daguerre’s assertion. What the camera sees is true. That same year Hippolyte Bayard—who had invented a rival photographic process—produced the first falsified photograph, Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man. Bayard, in awittychallengetoDaguerre,demonstratedthatthephotographisnotmasterinitsownhouse. The camera sees what is put before it. Photographic objectivity is an illusion because the camera is neither the source nor the destination of its images. All subsequent image manipulation expands on this ambiguity. Nevertheless, as Alan Trachtenberg has written, the daguerreotype came “to stand for a certain kind of truth, for objectivity, the impartial representation of facts.”2 This belief remained at the heart of the modernist ethos of “straight” photography. “Objectivity is the true essence of photography,” wrote Paul Strand in 1917. “The fullest realization of this is accomplished without tricks of process or manipulation.”3 Until recently, most theorists of photographyacceptedStrand ’sposition,assertingtheobjectivityof photographicrepresentation. “Photographyfurnishesevidence,”declaredSusanSontag,echoingWalterBenjamin’sfamous statementthat“with Atget,photographsbecomestandardevidenceforhistoricaloccurrences.”4 As documentary evidence of real events, modernist photographic space remained inviolable. Confronting a photograph, László Moholy-Nagy claimed, “everyone will be compelled to see that which is optically true.”5 Sontag drew the logical conclusion: “A fake painting (one whose attribution is false) falsifies art history. A fake photograph (one which has been retouched , tampered with, or whose caption is false) falsifies reality.”6 According to this tradition , image manipulation is at best a trick or a scandal; at worst, it is a crime. 113 Theadventof sophisticateddigitalimage-processingtoolsinthe1990shasthereforestruck photography with the force of a trauma, like the return of the repressed. From scandals at Time and National Geographic to the criminal falsification of passports, the violation of photographic space by tampering hands has seemed to signal a new era of indeterminacy, an “age of falsification,” as Kenneth Brower put it in the Atlantic Monthly.7 Yet from the beginning, a rival photographic practice has challenged the camera’s veracity. Victorian-era photographers like Oscar G. Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson produced combination prints encompassing up to thirty individual negatives. Among the modernists, Dada photographers Hannah Höch, Georg Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, and many others contested Strand’s claim to exclusivepossessionof photography’s“trueessence.” AndwellbeforePhotoshopintroduced paintlike fluidity into photographic space, artists like Val Telberg, William Mortensen, Arnulf Rainer, and Jerry Uelsmann experimented with a wide variety of manipulation techniques. The photographers in this tradition reminded viewers that image manipulation does not falsify reality; it manipulates images. In the equation of photography with objective truth, there is a longing for stability, as if a photograph were not a composition but a transcription of reality, fixed in time and protected from change. Image manipulation brings photography back into motion, unsettling our grasp on what it depicts. As a violation of the captured moment, it makes the photographic image justonestepinasignifyingprocessthatthecameradoesnotcontrol.Modernist“straight”photography repressed this instability, concentrating its vision in the decisive moment. Postmodernist —and especially digital—photography refigures the modernist vision, acknowledging manipulation as the essence of photography and employing it to reveal the technical, social, and psychological construction of images. LynnHershmanisnotaphotographer. Althoughsheoftenemploysphotographyinherwork, Hershman rarely leaves a photograph alone. Since the 1960s, she has been reshaping photographswithpaint ,photocopiers,text,collage,andnowdigitalimageprocessing.Forher,photographic space was never inviolable. She belongs rather to an alternative tradition that treats photographs as raw material in a broader project of image making. Along with artists as diverse as Arthur Tress, Duane Michals, Nancy Burson, Lucas Samaras, and Eleanor Antin, Hershman has pursued a sophisticated visual aesthetic at the confluence of photography, theater , painting, and collage.8 Hershman is not a photographer, but an image manipulator. As a result, her work has until Glenn Kurtz 114 Composing with Images 115 recently remained outside the mainstream of photographic concerns. The arrival of digital image processing, however, has changed that. As image manipulation breaks the surface of photographic space, it also breaks the hold of “straight” photography on the medium’s history . Photographers now grappling with the powerful new tools of digital image making find themselves novice participants in a different tradition, one to which Hershman has made important contributions. The best of her predigital image manipulations point to a fluid and disconcerting relationship with images that few...