gardinerlecture | Linda Cummings

Yale University, “Gardiner Humanities Lecture Series”
(Artist Talk: 12/2003)

The Work of Linda Cummings

PRACTICES OF PICTURE-MAKING: PHOTOGRAPHY & PSYCHOTHERAPY

Let me begin by saying that there is an inherent difficulty in putting pictures into words, as Nancy Olsen’s article with that title so richly illustrates. Tonight in my talk, I'll be bridging these two representational systems, images and words, and wondering with you, how they interplay in the way I make photographs. Drawing on parallels between my two creative practices - photography and psychotherapy - I will share my observations of organizing principles common to both practices. Since both involve a scrutiny of the act of looking I have found overlapping concepts and terminologies – for example, emphasis on the frame, focus, latent image, projection, etc.

I will show you selected slides from an on-going photographic project of mine that I hope may trigger some thoughts and associations to your own work that we can explore afterward. All the images I’ll show you tonight are slides of 16” x 20” Black and White Silver Gelatin Photographs that I print myself in a traditional darkroom. There has been no manipulation of the images in the darkroom or on location. All photographs you’ll see are taken in real-life environments and are not double-exposures.

My photography is driven by a desire make sense of my experience and place in the world - especially the relationships between the self, the social, and the forces (both internally and externally) that shape us. I try to make what Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, (1981) refers to as “good photographs – “photographs in which the object speaks, and induces us, vaguely, to think”. Perhaps even further, as Barthes suggests I am making “photographs that take the risk of being perceived as dangerous”. I have come to recognize my photographic practice is connected primarily to the visual art practices of drawing and performance.

Photography relies primarily on the currency of light, space and time to explore meaning within the frame of the viewfinder. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, relies primarily on the currency of words to explore meaning within the frame of the analytic hour. Mental pictures, memories, and dreams affect perception, re-cognition and re-formulation and are central to the process of both. Like words, images are multi-determined and multi-layered. Both imaging systems – words and pictures - access latent images as the underlying structure for the manifest content. Both words and images are part of symbolic language, and as such, can merely point to something else. It is my curiosity that “something else “ that lies at the heart of both my photographic and psychotherapy practice.

You will see many references in my photographs to places and experiences that shaped my early life. I grew up in a large Irish-Catholic family in the coal belt of central Pennsylvania where everyone’s energy fed the steel mill and the steel industry fed everyone. The local economy was fixated on the alchemy of turning molten metals into slabs of steel, which then fueled the production of buildings and bridges and trucks. It was a man’s world. Although I first began taking pictures almost as a defense at family gatherings, I actually learned the nuts and bolts of the craft working as an industrial photographer for Mack Trucks. Initially I was charged with photographing the assembly of trucks on the production line and later, I was sent on location world-wide to make pictures of Mack Trucks performing their varied tasks. After a decade of shooting trucks, I realized there must be “something else”. I quit the job and moved to New York, where I could turn my attention to making pictures for myself. However, while I could leave the job, I could not escape the conditions into which I was born, and which had shaped my imagination. This first slide is of a photograph taken in 1996 in Bethlehem , PA at the foot of a steel mill that no longer exists. It is entitled “Black Cloud”.

Slide : “Black Cloud”

When I wonder about the influence of technology and culture in shaping my experience, and my photography, I turn to psychoanalysis to help me understand the fundamental ambivalence of our human relation to experience. Experience has been an important theme in recent psychoanalytic thinking, particularly in the writings of Wilfred Bion (1983). Bion’s work is concerned with experience and knowledge of the world, and equally, with the retreat from experience and the difficulty of learning from experience. As Hans Thorner (1981) puts it, “side by side with the desire for knowledge, there is a resistance to knowledge. Getting to know inevitably brings the individual into contact with objects that arouse displeasure. Hence, tolerance to pain and displeasure is a precondition of the ability to think.” For me, photographing is a form of visual thinking.

I am alluding to Merleau-Ponty’s consideration of “vision as an operation of thought”, where the body sees itself seeing...touches itself touching, and is sensitive to itself”. Like drawing or writing, making a photograph can be a form of visual inscription. Photography means writing with light. A new idea emerges in the process of this light writing. In making a photograph a thought is given form. A photographer must have a certain tolerance to pain by daring to see what one does not want to see, or alternately - in finding a way to represent, in the photograph, that which is not represented in the world. In my photographs, “trouble” brews on the horizon as I stir things up in the landscape. My presence in the context of each photograph is that of the Agitator. As a result, the pictures I create are both pleasurable and dis-pleasurable, as reflective of my lived experience. I think my photographs are essentially melancholic.

SLIDE # "Re-Finery"

I often court danger in the production of my photographs. In this image, entitled “Re-Finery”, I was approached by a security guard who demanded I surrender the film right out of my camera and promptly escorted me to the gate. Fortunately, I had already taken one roll that was secretly concealed in my pocket! Many of my photographs reflect upon our postmodern condition of living in, and exposure to, invalidating environments. The environments in which I photograph are often highly charged locations that by their very nature are exclusive, restrictive or alienating. Perhaps it is because of my own experience of feeling distanced, being outside of, or alienated that the invisible body floating through a world apart emerges as a recurring theme in my work.

SLIDE: ” Crush“ (Coal Breakers)

I work as spontaneously as possible in an effort to evade creative censorship. Speed, repetition and surprise are central to my process. I scour the world in search of stages within which dramatic moments are enacted, or unfold in time. I construct photographic events as performative acts to be recorded by my camera. The various locations I choose are what Bauchelard refers to in the “Poetics of Space” as the “site of the dream” (sight of the dream). These sites include mills, refineries, mines, churches, hospitals, and stadiums, among others. I select them because of their iconographic relationship to technology, culture or a particular place in my history. This image, entitled “ Crush “ was taken inside an abandoned coal mine, in Hazeldon, Pennsylvania.

SLIDE: “Break Dance” (Coal Mine)

In both my photographic process, and my clinical work, I am what Sullivan coined, the “participant observer”. As a participant, I direct or toss the toss the slip into the air. As an observer, I am the one who triggers the shutter, frames the image, selects which negative to print from the sequence of perhaps hundreds taken on any given shoot. Isn’t this process of observation and intervention similar to that of the analyst who selects which thought to focus upon and explore, from the many offered by the patient in the course of the hour?

Like the frame of the analytic hour, meaning within the frame of the photograph is partly constructed through identifications, associations and juxtaposition of elements. Words or phrases selected by the analyst tap into unconscious meaning in the narrative of the patient’s life. So, too, viewers may gain access to unconscious meaning in my photographs through what Roland Barthes (1983) refers to as the “the punctum” of the photograph, that is, "the detail that pricks my attention… and has the power of expansion".

SLIDE “Exchange Values”

The staging, or construction, or each image is itself a blueprint for what I see as my parallel struggle to construct a self in the midst of whirling, and often contradictory, forces - be they historical, technological, cultural or experiential. Like this image, I live a life of contradiction. This photograph, entitled “Ex-Change Values”, alludes to the collapse of Marxist ideology and two competing phantasies of deliverance through industrial production and sexual reproduction.
Visual meaning is conveyed through the contrasting tones and shapes. The translucency of the slip evokes an association of vulnerability against the impenetrability of the opaque and solid steel. The soft, cloud-like shape of the slip stands in sharp contrast to the hard, angular and sharpness of the basic oxygen furnace pictured here. The frail and the mighty exist side by side. The juxtaposition of opposites - the open, flowing, translucent garment against the enclosed, angular, solid forms of steel - makes me curious how these two divergent elements might change, or affect, one another, or our interpretation of them?

SLIDE “Grand Canyon Leap”

In my photographic process I am literally trying to break out of rigidities imposed by habit, history and even the medium or technology of photography itself. To effect this breaking open, or re-arranging of elements, I use a method first employed by the dada and surrealists of the early 20th century - that of CHANCE operations. By tossing this garment to the wind I hope to set the stage for a dynamic interplay between order and chaos. Inviting the unpredictable into my process allows me both to have, and to loose, control in the process of making the picture. I think of myself as dancing with the universe. The largely uncontrollable forces of the wind, sunlight, gravity, cloud cover, and humidity interact with me, my camera and the cloth in what I refer to as a ballet of surprises.
My photographs allude to the aleatoric world – a world governed by chance or indeterminate elements. As a child I wanted to escape linear time and the burden of making sense. I loved the fact that picture making did not have to be logical. Pictures could cross the threshold between the visible and invisible worlds of my as yet inarticulate feelings. Today, I understand this allure from the perspective of research in child development. Piaget (1969) notes “As the external world is solely represented by images, it is assimilated without resistance to the unconscious ego”.

Slide: Chaco Canyon “Slipper”

A familiar absence is present in all my images. Here, the slip represents something disappearing, or the thing which has become no-thing, perhaps a self in mutation. It is empty and full at the same time. It is suspended above, and separated from, from the world it inhabits. It is off-center, dis-oriented, cast - off, yet irrepressible. By virtue of its strikingly out-of-place-ness, and its scale in the frame, the slip has a presence that is undeniable and highly visible. Ironically, the actual function of a slip is just the opposite - that is, to render the body invisible, or at least to conceal the body. Instead, this slip is flung by the hand of a hidden power, aloft in the sky - suspended in time, both rising and falling. Its mystery distracts our attention from what it may conceal, or reveal about itself. It’s entitled “Slipper”, in homage to one who may have walked this desert plateau of Chaco Canyon New Mexico thousands of years ago.

Slide: "In The name of the Daughter"

I ask myself why does the slip keep recurring, like an unwanted or intrusive thought, an unconscious element that insists on a presence? As we all know, that which has been disavowed often returns in unexpected places. In this image, entitled "In the Name of the Daughter", the transgressive feminine asserts itself. Above an altar upon which the legitimacy of the body is ritualistically denied, the slip hovers, as a phantom reminder of the return of the repressed.

Much of my work has to do with narratives of the body. In selecting the trope of the slip, I was looking for a reference to the female body, without actually representing the body. Initially, I was attracted to the idea of the slip because it was a 'figure of speech". Capable of operating as both a noun and a verb, "slip" had both visual and verbal appeal to me. The word "slip" had a playful linguistic flexibility, and the material of the thing itself, has an actual "slippery-ness" that could be visually translated. I found the poetry inherent in these multiple associations irresistible.

Slide: “St. Louis Cemetary”

The word "slip" can be read on many levels. It has symbolic meanings, descriptive meanings, fetishistic meanings, indexical meanings and literal meanings. The word "slip" has both contradictory, and mutually exclusive meanings - that is, in some cases it can mean to loose (as in to drift, to loose one's balance, to loose control) and in other cases it can signify that which holds together, (as in boat slip, pottery slip). I am drawn to this ambiguity because it is characteristic of my subjective experience.

Slide: “Temptation of St. Anthony”

The verb, "to slip" indicates something unintended has happened, something unexpected, unplanned, has occurred beyond one's control. Someone slips, looses one's balance, becomes disoriented, falls, slips up, slips out, slips in. Is this what is meant by the “Freudian slip”? My literal use of a slip becomes a sign, a visual representation for the floating, pervasive, elusive unconscious that disappears and reappears in our world.

Slide: “By Whose Arms Do We Fall?”

We move now from the theater of religion to the theaters of contemporary religion - namely, sport and war. I am very interested in the dialectical relationship between the spectator and the spectacle and how the two co-construct an on-going narrative of desire. Whether this happens in the church, the stadium or on the battlefield, those watching and those performing are engaged in a ritual that reinforces and influences the position of the other. This is a photograph taken against the backdrop of the WWII war memorial in the Battery Park on the tip of Manhattan. The title of this photograph is “By Whose Arms do we Fall?”

Slide - "The Liquidator"

I am very interested in how relationships of power are constructed – be that in the reciprocal relationships of the treatment room, or in the 2-dimensional frame of the viewfinder. In this image, entitled “The Liquidator” the vast and empty stadium bears witness to the fragile and empty slip, a fleeting phantom of desire. This is the Mets baseball stadium in Queens, NY. Since professional baseball is an entirely male sport this stadium represents a site in which only particular bodies are allowed to participate at the exclusion of all others.

Addressing this exclusion, not only is the body missing in this photograph but disappearing also is the division between public and private experience. The once private garment of the slip, a trope of vulnerability, now appears in highly charged public arena where the battle for power takes the form of sport. Appropriating this architecture of exclusivity, within the arena of power, I create an inversion of meaning. The slip whose function was once to protect, now exposes - and vulnerability becomes emblematic of strength in a curious role reversal.

Slide: “Sprint”

Constant surveillance, unauthorized intrusions, restricted access and blurring the boundaries between the public and private domains are issues of concern to me. In my photographs I address this concern through my selection of locations. Most sites I choose to photograph are places that are off-limits to me. My presence is that of the unwanted guest, the intruder or a trespasser. I generally have only limited, or illegal, access to any site. If consent has been granted, security personnel are standing off-frame and accompanying me. I think of my photographic acts as a kind of Guerilla Theater.

Slide: Track

By breaking into forbidden spaces, I am breaking out of my own limitations and suggesting a symbolic, or parallel border crossing for the viewer. This relationship, as photographer, of being an outsider who has found her way "inside” also reminds me, at times, of the way I sometimes feel in relation to my patients. However, as a clinician, I am more often than not, an invited, intended, or at minimum, a tolerated guest.

Slide: “Dive”

Recognizing that I desire to see, and simultaneously, to defend myself against seeing, I create images that reflect this ambivalence – images which confuse, disrupt, and question what is seen, what is real, or what can be known in an image. This image is from a project entitled “Anatomy of a Phantasy”. All images in this series were taken at the site of one of the first pools where female swimmers secretly competed at the turn of the twentieth century. The project took place over a week long period in which the slip was tied in place and photographed as the weather bore down on it, twisting and changing its shape. The slip is caught, or suspended in the midst of a dive, caught twice – once by the constraints of history and second, by the snapping of a shutter. It is also visual pun, commenting upon the impossible satisfaction of photographic desire to capture an image. Like a butterfly catcher roaming the countryside in search of monarchs, the moment of capture signals the moment of death.

Slide: “Double” (Mirror Image)

This image draws our attention to the process of seeing, too. A 3-D space is collapsed through properties of the lens. Time is stopped by a closing shutter. Light is inverted as a negative image on film. The past is resurrected as the present. Sound evaporates. Light is fixed. The negative becomes the positive. The slip is doubled by its reflection in the water.

Slide: “Rain”

All that may have once existed is now but an apparition, in question, or in flux. In and of itself, the photograph can only suggest a meaning, which the viewer must complete. It is the collaboration of the photographer’s imagination and the viewer’s projective identification that guides, and supplies, an interpretation of the image. The slip hovers on the edge of uncertainty, tethered to unseen elements off-frame, and constantly in the process of mutation as the wind and rain and gravity make their impression.

Slide: "Echo"

These next images, all taken within the past three years, mark a shift in my approach to time and the relationship between perception and recognition. This image, entitled "Echo", continues my exploration of the intersection between the individual and the collective, but with less emphasis on representational, or perspectival space. At this point, which coincided with the beginning of my serious study of psychoanalytic ideas, my photography pursues more an interest in psychological, or perceptual space. Perceptual space has a strong relationship to the body – to sight as well as sound and touch. It is a sensual understanding of space and relates to a felt experience of a body moving through space. Fragments speak to the whole without being discernable. The slip is less identifiable as an object. The distance between foreground and background is collapsed, and a visual quietude is introduced into the image.

Slide: “Silver Streak”

I wonder if my partial elimination of the referential indicators is a way to liberate the slip, the gesture, the light and darkness to be read now in a new form or language that is both tied, and untied to the world? Could my inclination toward abstraction be seen as parallel to the analyst’s use of silence in the treatment room? Silence is an absence of referent that introduces a different dimension between the patient and the therapist. My shift toward visual abstraction in the photograph, and the therapeutic use of silence in the treatment are renunciations of the “world as we normally experience it”. As such, viewing these images, like what may occur when silence enters the treatment, can engender a wide range of feelings – from curiosity to connection, or impotence to rage. It’s interesting that some people respond to this ambiguity with associations of freedom and possibility. Others find it claustrophobic and disquieting. My experience of the use of silence in the treatment room has evoked a similarly wide range of feelings and associations.

SLIDE: “Lapse”

In this series, the slips become gestures and are more fully integrated, or merging, with the landscape of the frame. In the earlier work, which I refer to as “Hysterical Gestures” there was a kind of voyeuristic identification to the image, one in which the witness was external to the slip, or body. In this later work, one’s relation to the image is more internal. Whatever is to be known about the body in this photograph happens inside the mind of the viewer. The spectator is no longer outside the image. The spectator and spectacle have merged.

Slide: “Lacuna”

What about gesture is so important? The gesture that continually repeats in my work is one of tossing an object away from the body, and then retrieving that tossed off object in the body of the photograph itself. There is a circular activity of tossing away, and bringing back. It’s a simple act, and one everyone does everyday in many contexts - tossing and catching: objects, thoughts, relationships, worries.

This rhythm of tossing and tossed, catching and caught is a dynamic familiar not only to the mechanics of the photographic act, but also, I find, similar to the gestural re-enactment in the “Fort-Da” analogy of the Freudian child who figures the pleasure/displeasure experience of loss and retrieval in its play. The child, who repeatedly throws the toy out of the cot for it to be constantly retrieved, stages the tragedy of the loss over and over again.

Slide: “Airy Disc”

Tossing the toy is a gesture that signifies the recognition that not only do I exist, but that my existence can only be fully experienced, or known, in relation to another – a witness. Could this process of tossing the slip over and over be seen as parallel to the primal gesture of reaching out to the departing mother? Repeating the sequence of this embodied memory of separation paradoxically liberates the space “in-between” where much is in transition: separating and binding, sensation and thought, perception and recognition. To me, these images suggest the paradox of needing to get rid of something one can’t afford to loose.

Slide:”Albedo”

Much of my time is spent either pulling things closer to my body, or pushing them further away. That which I most value , and want to memorialize, and that which I disavow , and want to toss away, are all part of these ambiguous and mobile gestures. In this picture, one is not so much looking at the thing itself as at its suggestion, at the possibility of a formation that has yet to occur. There is an uncertainty as to what stage it is in its becoming.
In this image, entitled “Albedo” I find a swirling gesture that speaks to my thoughts and feelings about time and my chronological age. As I approach middle age I am now at the still point of a turning world, whereby I can see both the beginning and the end of my life with a new kind of clarity and anxiety.

SLIDE: “Theater of Operations”

As often happens, an invitation from unexpected quarters breathes new life into old forms. A physician asked me to provide images for a hospital benefit, and as a result, I was granted access to the operating room to make pictures. I returned to the use of perspectival space, however, with a new approach to the ambiguity of light and loss. I also thought of the OR as a stage, again in the sense of both noun and verb. The operating theater is a stage both in the physical sense of a place where dramatic events unfold, and also, a stage as a process in time - that is, a developmental sequence, the stage in transition.

Slide: “Theater of Operations-2”

Photographs in this series imply both the figuration and disfiguration that occurs to the body during surgical interventions. I want to suggest the fragility, mutability, surrender and resistance of bodies on the surgical stage. The high intensity lights of the operating room suggest both penetration and transcendence, and “frame” the tension between the interiority and externality of the body.

Slide: “Theater of Operation-3” (Roll)

We live in a world that engages and depends upon technologies that by their very nature distance us from experience, and sometimes from survival. In these images I am in part playing with the idea of photography as surgery. Both the camera and the knife are tools that operate by dismemberment, in the service of re-memberment. A disembodied eye, the camera distances our vision, and dissects it. Perhaps, in the process of photographing I am contributing to my own fragmentation, even as I seek to create a sense of cohesion through the very same process.

SLIDE: Rio Caliente - 1

Photography, like language or time, punctuates the flow of consciousness. A photograph appears to stop the flow of time. In this image the subject is how a body relates to time. I am moving, the slip is moving, and the stage, which is a waterfall is moving too. The exposure is made as I literal step into the frame with my body. The slip is falling through the frame at its own rate, determined by gravity, the wind, and the density of the steam drenched cloth. The combination of these three rates of speed, mine, the slip and the water are what determines the final, abstract image

.
Slide: Rio Caliente -2

These pictures are guided less by a visual exploration of space as they are an exploration of movement. I was wondering about a time when gesture existed as the pure undifferentiated action of bodily sensation gesticulating into the world. I was playing with the idea that an image might not have to be an a priori event, but something that happened in the time of its making –the way a spider weaves a web. I was mostly concerned with the perception of time and of movement. The process of articulation, or coming to terms with what the image “looks like” happens retrospectively.

Slide: Rio Caliente -3

Freud observed that the psychic organ of apprehension is the ego. Following Lacan, the ego structures experience in ways that offer an illusion of order and comprehensibility to our lives. From this perspective, time is not so much an actuality of experience as a dimension of the ego’s ordering of experience. Without this effort of ordering, therefore, there is no consensus about time. In the treatment setting, isn’t it in part the non-linear nature of time that facilitates the process of regression? The possibility that time can go forward or backward is most obvious in dreamlife. In photography, it is this same fluidity of time that allows for an image to be plucked from the narrative of its time, and held in a latent form in the negative, to be processed and “made positive”, made known, sometime later. The event and the image are separated in time, or to quote Nancy’s paper, “the photograph survives the event”.

Slide: TMI (Arch)

In both my clinical practice and my photography, I have come to recognize the value of mistakes as harbingers of unconscious wishes. My recent work at the Three Mile Island nuclear facility in Pennsylvania is an example of mistakes redeeming themselves. When I returned from this shoot I was devastated to see that all my negatives were underexposed, due to the overcast weather conditions the day I was shooting. After about three months of frustration, I began to recognize that I needed to not only accept, but embrace the blackness.

Slide: TMI (Black Tower)

On a psychological level, that means moving into the aspects of the image that had been consistently denied – the underside, the ways in which the slip might be implicated, rather than separate or aloof, from its environment. This is a white slip rendered black “by mistake”. Rather than highlights, and critical clarity, which had been previously my aim, obscurity is dominant. Murky grays of the in-between, not-so-clear Zone, needed to find expression. Perhaps I am representing a territory where divisions between self and stranger, good and bad, winner and loser are not quite so separate.

Slide:TMI (Tension Wires)

Photographs are fragments. Sontag (2003) notes, “there is no final photograph”. By their nature and their construction, photographs are not whole and are never complete. They are slices, glimpses, cut off from the stream of life by four edges. They are containers of the past and what has been already been. And already lost. In a sense, all photographs are lost objects that both hold onto and release the past simultaneously. Both photography and analysis are engaged in a relationship to the past, and to the recovery of what has been lost, denied, or disavowed.

Frustration and loss are huge motivators in my work. I’m always aware of trying to catch something elusive, before it slips away. A desire to “catch something” not quite possible. Something just below the threshold of my awareness. To catch a glimpse. To catch a thread, or a detail of the dream, to catch a slippery thought, to catch myself slipping as I hurry, to catch myself slipping off to sleep. To catch myself off-guard, To catch myself giving myself away, to catch a feeling before it goes underground...

Slide: Flutter
Robbins (1999) notes that experience must involve us in a dynamic link with the world, always and continually impelling us to introduce new elements of disorder into the static and consolidating ordering of past experience. What this requires is that we relinquish our postures of omnipotence and recognize the potential inherent in the complexity and indeterminacy of a world that is beyond our subjective powers.
In both my practice of photography and psychotherapy it is my aim to strike a balance between mastery and surrender. Both provide me with a refuge for reflection and a language of experience. Both forms of engagement carry the power to re-present the world. Both provide potential spaces from which new formations of experience and can be articulated and take root. To slip means to loose one's balance, to be off-center, to fall from a secure position. Isn't this the condition of all human subjects in a world of change?