Between February 1981 and December 1984, in less than four years, Henry, an inhabitant of Long Island, New Jersey, took about 5,500 photographs of his wife Martha, naked or undressing; four a day on average. In these images, Martha, who appears to be approximately 60 years old, is increasingly bored, detached, alienated from what is happening to her, rarely looking in the lens, submissive to her husband's directives. He is particularly interested in his wife's bust, her bras, squeezing her breasts with his hands; many images also represent her fully nude, standing or lying down, a body marked by age but still firm. Others are close-ups of her breasts, nipples and areolas. On the contrary, the pubis and vulva, as well as the buttocks, never appear in close-up.
No tenderness in these photographs, no complicity, no eroticism either: just an obsessive voyeurism of the female body. We are a long way from the loving work of Eugene von Bruenchenheim, full of tenderness and respect for Marie, always beautiful and accomplice. The word that comes to mind here is more repetitive taxonomy, even if, in several photographs, Martha poses, makes mischievous or dismayed faces, rarely smiles, engages in lethargy.
Henry organizes an office lined with these nude pictures of Martha. Most are in black and white, the contact proofs are marked with post-its dating them, but also pointing out the themes (« bent », « squeezing », « rope over bust », « kneeling »). A double-entry table summarizes the dates and the technical or postural characteristics of the photographs, with, in one corner, future projects: in the smoking process, hands on the back of the head, behind,...
In late 1984 or early 1985 , Martha suffocates in this ménage à trois with the camera, and left her husband: she refuses this photographic obsession of her body, marriage is (for that reason and no doubt for others) a failure. Before leaving, she throws the prints out the window of her house, the photographs cover the garden and the path, flying in the wind.
Henry, deprived of his object of desire, can only enjoy the preserved photographs of his wife. It is then, it seems to me, that, from being an obsessive but banal voyeur, he becomes an artist in the fullest sense: he sublimates the frustration of the absence of the beloved woman in order to move on to a more creative activity than simply photographing; he creates new, ghostly forms out of his real ones.
Martha became an abstraction, an artistic material. First, he creates around fifty collages, assembling a highlighted detail of Martha's anatomy (except her face) to make erotic compositions that we can link to certain surrealists such as Georges Hugnet or Nush Éluard, or even certain images by André Kertesz. In the contact tests, we highlight four color photographs from April 1981, where Henry, through multiple exposure, had already experimented with breast multiplication.
.jpg)
From these collages, he moves on to sculpture: multiple female bodies surprisingly sweet and tender, 17 clay figures with silver sand. Without having the systemic character of Die Puppe, we are here in a similar vein, especially if we remember that Hans Bellmer made this doll at the moment he was withdrawing from the world, in his case in the face of the rise of Nazism. We also think of certain sculptures by Victor Brauner or the polymastic Artemis from Ephesus. It is quite fascinating to see how Henry thus develops a form of artistic creation, far beyond his obsessive photographs, which we can evidently classify under the broad category of art brute. Once this is done, he leaves to live in the forest, like a hunter, feeding on wild animals he captures, and disappears.
How do we know all this? The Dutch artist Mariken Wessels, who has already made a series around found photographs, would have obtained these photographs, as well as other images of the couple, of their house and Henry's cabin in the woods, of two friends and neighbors of the couple, who would have retrieved the set after Henry's departure, and of whom Mariken Wessels says she lived next door when, then an actress, she lived in New York in 1996-97. She made a 330-page book with very little text (2 or 3 pages only) on the occasion of her exhibition in The Hague in 2017; the book has just been reprinted by Art Paper Editions. The book (which won the Book Award for Author in Arles in 2016) includes 147 contact proofs of 36 images each (i.e. 5292 photos) on glossy paper, the reproduction of the 50 collages and 17 figurines, and other photographs of their childhood, their marriage, their home, from Henry's office, an enigmatic loose-leaf of Merry Christmas starting with "There he is, your son, Ma",... The title "Taking Off" can mean taking off (the bra); it can also mean to take off, to leave (like Martha).
Is it really an archive of photographs found in a somewhat shaky way? Or is it entirely a fictional creation of the artist? The only clue I've found is the names of the two neighbors who supposedly entrusted the file to Mariken Wessels: Dorothy Bartlett (like him) and Edward F. Caroll (almost like him). Additionally the Hackettstown Heritage Center for Arts & Crafts, where the carved figures of Henry would be deposited, appears to be non-existent. But also the feeling that it is very perfect, very well done. Who knows? Only this blog, to my knowledge, has also expressed a doubt about the veracity of this file.
Marc Lenot
Since 2005 he has authored the blog Lunettes Rouges, published by the newspaper Le Monde. In 2009 he obtained his Master's degree with a dissertation on the Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý, and in 2016 he received a PhD from the University of Paris with a thesis on contemporary experimental photography. A member of AICA, he won the 2014 AICA France Art Critic Award for his presentation of the work of the French-Ecuadorian artist Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza.
