Dial "P" for Panties: Narrative Photography in the 1990s

Afterimage, Jan, 2000 by Lucy Soutter

As a photographer, an art historian and a feminist, I have been bothered for some time by a particular strand of contemporary photography. It started as a joke: I had seen so many quasi-narrative art photographs of half-dressed young women that I began referring to them as their own genre, "panty photography." As with many inside jokes, once I had coined the term, I began to find validation for it everywhere. Panties seemed to be proliferating in art

galleries and magazines. The New York Times ran an article about the current cross-over between art, fashion and pornography, and shortly thereafter an article about hot young female artists and their hot new work. [1] The phenomenon came to a well-publicized head in a spring 1999 exhibition at Lawrence Rubin * Greenberg Van Doren Fine Art in New York City. "Another Girl, Another Planet," curated by Gregory Crewdson and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, included images by 13 photographers, 12 of them women. The work was mostly color and primarily figurative and the major ity of the photographs depicted women or girls caught in evocative, ambiguous scenarios. And yes, many were in their underwear. This article is not intended as a review of the show, except insofar as to confirm Time Out critic Bill Arning's assessment of its timeliness. [2] I am interested in "Another Girl" because it offers an opportunity to examine several significant trends in photography at the turn of the century.

The images in the exhibition were united by a narrative tendency that has been prevalent in the photography of the 1990s, but has not received adequate critical analysis. I would like to make clear from the outset that I am not referring to multi-image serial narratives (such as Tracey Moffatt's recent "Laudanum" series [1998]), nor to narratives in which photographs are grounded with text (as in Duane Michals's staged sequences from the 1960s or Carrie Mae Weems's early-1990s "Kitchen Table Series"). Instead, these images present frozen suggestive moments, commonly likened to film stills drawn from movies that do not exist, or to documentary photographs separated from their real world sources and stripped of a typical documentary agenda. If these pieces come with titles, they usually serve to reinforce the ambiguity of the scene. Many of the works are officially untitled, using the non-title to mark their place in a modernist tradition of free-standing, anti-functional art photography. In order to pinpoint and analyze these images, I will adapt a descriptive model from the literary study of narrative discourse to explain the way in which these pictures present and sustain semiotic and political ambiguity.

As the title suggested, the narratives in "Another Girl, Another Planet" were overwhelmingly female-based and focused attention on the bodies of young women and girls. Many emerging photographers have been accused of using flesh--sometimes their own--to attract both media attention and the jaded gaze of connoisseurs, Yet a number of arguments can be used to defend narrative photographs with potentially sensationalistic subject matter against their attackers. Some of these arguments are important and valid for protecting ambitious contemporary art as a whole from philistines and iconophobes. On the other hand, I believe it is important to investigate this particular strand of contemporary practice closely in order to confirm that art photography has not become merely a satellite of the fashion or pornography industry.

As critics did not fail to note, "Another Girl, Another Planet" had an incestuous flavor, due to the fact that six of the photographers graduated in the past three years from Yale University's MFA program, where they studied with co-curator Crewdson. [3] The curators tempered the Yale factor by drawing the rest of the artists from far afield, including Sarah Dobai and Sarah Jones from London; Jitka Hanzlova, Liza May Post and Vibeke Tandberg from other cities in Europe; and Dayanita Singh from New Delhi. Reinforcing the thesis that Yale graduates play an important role in the international photography scene, the catalog includes one image by each of three emerging photographers whose work has begun to attract critical and market attention: Anna Gaskell (Yale MFA, 1995), Annika von Hausswolff and Rineke Dijkstra. These three pictures provide a frame of reference for the newer works in the exhibition, but one that is loosely associative, rather than clearly articulated. In order to draw out the relationship be tween the "Another Girl" pictures and their recent precedents, it is necessary to analyze one of these earlier images more closely.

In von Hausswolff's 1993 color photograph, Back to Nature, a naked woman lies face down in a shallow marsh, her pale, splayed limbs half-submerged. She is placed just right of center of the horizontal rectangular frame. Her body marks a break between the thick reeds in the upper left corner of the picture and the reflective ripples of water in the bottom right. The body is pointed away from the viewer, so that the soles of the feet are closest to the picture plane and the torso and head are foreshortened. This angle emphasizes the figure's dark crotch and the crack between her buttocks. While the wetland setting of the picture is a familiar part of photography's longstanding love affair with uncultivated landscapes and reflected light, the staged crime scene pose of the figure reflects particularly contemporary concerns.