HIDDEN HISTORIES.

PEEK: Photographs from the Kinsey Institute edited by Carol Squiers, Jennifer Yamashiro, et. al.

Santa Fe: Arena Editions, 2000 188 pp./$60.00 (hb)

In 1938 zoologist Alfred E. Kinsey, a faculty member at Indiana University, was asked to coordinate a course on marriage. Faced with a dearth of available materials, Kinsey began amassing his own collection of legal, medical, psychological and sexological data. This amalgamation of written and visual works eventually garnered sufficient institutional support to secure funding and became the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research in 1947. In the years that followed Kinsey saw his Bloomington, Indiana-based institute grow into a world-renowned repository for materials of all kinds--literary, artistic, cinematic, clinical, legal--and a site for research and learning.

With the publication of the now legendary Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), with its frank discussions of masturbation, homosexuality and a variety of other forbidden topics, Kinsey's name became synonymous with "sex," and to many Americans, with "sexual anomalies." This association became even stronger when, in 1950, the Institute sued the United States Customs Department in a highly publicized battle over the confiscation of a collection of sexually-explicit materials en route from Denmark to Indiana. Although the Institute eventually won the case in 1957, Kinsey never lived to enjoy the victory--he died in 1956. Throughout its exceptional history, the Kinsey Institute has hosted some of the most important figures in the cultural life of the mid-twentieth century. Early visitors to the Kinsey Center included luminaries of the literary and artistic worlds, as well as from the sciences. Among the most notable of these were writers W. H. Auden, William Inge, Cornelia Otis Skinner and Glenway Wescott; museum administrators Eric Dingwall (of the British Museum) and Monroe Wheller (of the Museum of Modern Art); publisher Lawrence Saunders; and scientists Albert Ellis, William Masters (of Masters and Johnson) and Robert Yerkes. Countless others made contributions in the form of donations. Today the Kinsey continues to host a stellar list of visiting scholars, providing them with the opportunity to use its vast resources and, more importantly, to share their ideas with individuals from other disciplines whose work also centers on the issues of gender, sex and sexuality.

Peek: Photographs from the Kinsey Institute, the newly-published coffee table collection of high-quality reproductions of photos from the Kinsey archives, gives its readers a privileged look--a "peek," if you will--into the Institute's vast photography collection and the private histories of twentieth-century sexuality recorded there. Although works from the Kinsey collection have already appeared in collections such as James Crump's George Platt Lynes: Photographs From The Kinsey Institute (1993), Thomas Waugh's Hard To Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography (1996), Joseph Becherer's Selections from the Collections of the Kinsey Institute (1991) and Barbara Miller's Gender Affects (1996), the current volume offers the widest selection ever of the Institute's photography collection.

Curator Jennifer Yamashiro and her collaborators, Betsy Stirratt and Jeff Wollen, have brought together some of the Institute's most arresting images, along with historical and critical assessments of the work and of the Institute's mission. These essays bracket the book's visual content without disturbing the natural flow of images. The photos are arranged thematically rather than chronologically, thus lending the book the air of a pricey exhibition catalog rather than a visual cabinet of psychopathia sexualis.

Carol Squiers's "Introduction to a Book of Sexual Photographs" and Yamashiro's essay "Collecting Sex," provide critical and historical contexts for readers unfamiliar with the histories of the Kinsey Institute and sexuality studies. In addition, they introduce key concepts from current debates around the representation of gender and sexuality. Yamashiro's work is especially intriguing both for its explanations of how Kinsey obtained material for his archive, and even more so for how he viewed this material primarily as data rather than art.

Although the critical writings that accompany them are well-written and informative, the power of the book--its usefulness as a historical document and as a critical and analytical tool--lies almost exclusively in its images and the nearly unlimited possibilities for investigation and analysis that they offer. Peek's collection runs the gamut from grainy snapshots from anonymous donors to breathtaking masterpieces by artists such as George Platt Lynes.

In addition to providing a visual dictionary of sexual practices, these photos also present a parallel history of social attitudes toward sex and sexuality that runs nearly imperceptibly through the book's 188 pages. The mise-en-scenes and representational standards of each of the encounters recorded between subject and photographer provide key clues to the social and cultural mores of the time. The most obvious example of this is illustrated by the preponderance of images of women displaying their genitalia, which culminates in a disturbingly normalized gelatin silver print c. 1900, in which a bridegroom proudly exhibits his wife's crotch to the onlooking photographer (and, of course, to the reader/viewer). Judging from the smiles on their faces and the tastefully appointed surroundings (leopard skin rug notwithstanding), one might think that the participants viewed the shot as nothing more than one in a standard series of wedding day photos. The situation immediately calls to mind the traditional sexual do uble-standard that demands women to be simultaneously attractive and virginal and that assigns women the unmistakable role of sex object, possession and, in this case, even trophy. The function of this image in Kinsey's collection is unclear. Perhaps it was cataloged as an illustration of heterosexuality and marriage. When viewed through the lens of recent writings in the fields of critical theory and feminist analysis, however, it becomes a text of a different kind.

This same sort of impromptu meta-commentary pops up, rather unexpectedly and perhaps inadvertently, in many of Peek's photos. The cover shot (c. 1935) of a woman squeezing her breasts into a picture frame both calls to mind the amazingly self-aware self-portraits of the Countess de Castiglione, while at the same time invoking the fetishistic and idealized images of popular pornography. Although its intention is evidently lost in the pages of unwritten or unrecorded history, the frontispiece (mid-twentieth century) of a woman with the word "PROOF" stamped across her back suggests a modern perspective that differs very little from those of contemporary artists such as Barbara Kruger, Sherry Levine or Cindy Sherman.

This critical vision is built into one of the book's literal and figurative centerpieces, Paul Burk's 1997 series "Man Jerking Off." The series carefully replicates the visual style of turn-of-the-century photographer Edweard Muybridge's nude motion studies. In so doing, it foregrounds the erotic content of these historical works and raises significant questions about the line that is routinely and arbitrarily drawn between scientific data (the chalk lines on the wall are a constant reminder of the ostensibly "scientific" nature of Muybridge's photos) and erotica. The male subject of Burk's photos is eroticized and idealized as he masturbates (in soft focus and key lighting), evidently unaware of the voyeuristic gaze of the camera/viewer. However, Burk's stunning work ultimately acknowledges and implicates the viewer with a knowing sideways glance that comes as a kind of epilogue to a series of images of apparent orgasmic ecstasy. Burk's work illustrates in clear visual terms the age-old debate around the su pposed distinctions between art, science, erotica and pornography that plagued Kinsey and that occupy the authors whose works form the bookends of this collection without recourse to the standard jargon of critical theory. It is a shining example of theory in practice. Its uniquely informed approach (at least in terms of this collection) stands out from the other photographs, and, more importantly, provides readers/viewers with keys to interpreting and understanding the images around it.

Peek is a valuable historical and critical documentation of the intertwined histories of photography, sexuality and representation. Editors Squiers and Yamashiro and their collaborators (including the artists and models) have brought these routinely hidden histories to light and opened the normally locked door of the Kinsey Institute, if only for the briefest of peeks.

ROBERT CAGLE writes about film and popular culture.