The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire.

edited by Deborah Bright New York: Routledge, 1998 441 pp./$30.00 (sb)

Although years of interdisciplinary labors have undoubtedly altered academia for the next millennium, the world of academic publishing has remained relatively unchanged. Scholars still write and edit books that are traditional in form, even though sometimes marginal in content and stuffy with regard to style. Although hundreds of scholars have forcefully argued that ours is an increasingly visual culture, one that confounds simplistic categorizations of image/imaginary and reality/fantasy, the majority of academic publishing is still organized around scholarly writing that presents a flow of information and analysis that is disconnected from other forms of knowledge such as personal insight, visual representation and artistic expression.

The Passionate Camera: Photography and bodies of desire, edited by artist-academic Deborah Bright, departs from the stale formulae of academic publishing and provides vibrant, rigorous and pleasurable readings of sex work in the practice of photography and the field of photographic criticism of recent years. Although the title suggests otherwise, Bright's anthology focuses almost exclusively on lesbigay representation, queer readings and same-sex desire. Her extraordinary introduction to the volume succeeds in its formidable task of making sense of the past 15 years of photography and queer cultural politics. Bright binds the different projects of the diverse contributors together into a robust response to the censorship debates of the '90s; she organizes a collective preservation and celebration of the explosion in independent, critical photography; she collects views on the insurgence of representational politics brought forth by AIDS activism; and through this furthers the emergence of queer studies in academia.

Bright reiterates an optimistic definition of "queer" that often fails short of its inclusionary intent, but she adds a productive self-critique that emphasizes the economic and sociopolitical realities that further marginalize communities within the queer rubric. In the same spirit of pragmatic politics Bright points to how the changing public image of queerness has not transformed the larger culture as we thought it promised. "Lesbian chic," discussed by many contributors, and male homoeroticism in mainstream advertising have linked queerness with the marketplace more than with liberatory politics. She writes:

In fact, it becomes painfully clear that the new "queer visibility" we are celebrating has been achieved largely for the minority of queers already privileged by society and at the expense of the majority who are not. It has also come at the price of uncoupling queer politics from other struggles for social and economic justice, as has been noted by more than a few critics on the left who are discomfited by the paradox of the emergence of middle-class queer media visibility precisely at the moment of conservatism's triumphant dismantling of the national welfare state and programs to increase access to economic opportunities for women and nonwhite men.

One need only look to the Human Rights Campaign Fund, the most influential national organization of the gay civil rights movement, which recently gave its political endorsement to Senator Alfonse D'Amato in the November 1998 congressional elections. The Senator from New York may have been "gay-friendly," though only in relation to the rest of the Republican Party, and the Human Rights Campaign traditionally supports incumbents, but he was also a politician who consistently waged war against the poor and the disenfranchised communities of color. D'Amato lost the election, but there are myriad other examples that support Bright's powerful argument on the pitfalls of mainstreaming queer culture.

Leaving aside Bright the theorist, it is Bright's role as creative and shrewd editor that makes The Passionate Camera such an exceptional volume. The book has an inner consistency that is uncommon in anthologies; the different essays flow into one another in a productive and lyrical manner. The three sections are metered by provocative photo essays and end with pointed short stories by artist and writer Catherine Lord, Section One, "Trouble in the Archive," comprises critical, queer(ed) readings of pre-Stonewal images: found photographs, male physical culture photography, the glamour and racially charged homoerotic photography of Carl Van Vechten, George Platt Lynes and Cecil Beaton and the fascinatingly perverse photography of Pierre Molinier.

The second section, "Inverted Views and Dissident Desires," goes on to explore photographic work of the past 25 years. The photography of Bright, Larry Clark, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Yasumasa Morimura, Mark Morrisroe and David Wojnarowicz are examined, as are projects by Lyle Ashton Harris, Thomas Allen Harris and Elizabeth Stephens, who all write about their own photographic practice. The final section, "Calculated Exposures in Risky Conditions," provides instructive "case studies where photographs played a key role in larger political and cultural debates around sexual dissent and queer visibility," as in HIV/AIDS activism. Even though many black and white images accompany each essay, Routledge wisely invested in high quality color reproductions that Bright organized into two portfolios that fall before and after the second section. Of the photographs included, the most remarkable are the widely exhibited and reproduced works by Laura Aguilar, Fani-Kayode, the Harris brothers, Morimura and Catherine Opie, along with outstanding and lesser-known works by Stephen Andrews, Ken Gonzales-Day, Sunil Gupta, Joe Smoke, Hanh Thi Pham and Suara Welitoff. The best work is Nina Leavitt's Submerged (for Alice Austen) (1991-92) and Think Nothing of It (Dorothy Arzner and Joan Crawford) (1990), two photo essays that unfold over four and five pages, respectively. Leavitt rephotographs, enlarges and strategically crops historical photographs to draw out traces of lesbian desire. The effect reverberates as vision is led to settle on a taut hand gesture and the palpitating relationship between two torsos, the result of a chummy embrace between Arzner, very butch in a tailored suit, and Crawford, quite femme in a glamorous pantsuit. An extensive and helpful bibliography closes the volume.

What makes Bright's anthology an engaging and unprecedented study of photography - the incorporation of visual, artistic and personal forms of knowledge in an academic context - is also the undoing of some of the essays. "Personal Criticism," as it has been labeled by scholars who have studied the phenomenon, can illuminate theoretical nuances that would otherwise be lost in the dry-speak of academic writing. Scholars can use their personal experience to make theoretical points stronger in their application to everyday life, to provide an organic demonstration of an argument or to express the human experiences that are beyond the reach of signification. However, sloppy personal criticism sometimes results in meaningless narcissism, sad attempts at literary pretension, useless autobiographical information and, at its worst, tacky self-confessions that would be better suited to television talk shows than to academic inquiry. There are many exceptional examples of forceful personal criticism in The Passionate Camera, unfortunately, there are also some examples that fail to make the relationship with theory and everyday life come alive.

The opening essay by David Deitcher, "Looking at a Photograph, Looking for a History," is an example of well-considered and inspiring personal criticism. Bright could not have picked a better essay to open a study on photography's complicated relationship to hidden histories, queer desire and scholarship. Deitcher writes about a nineteenth-century ambrotype he found of two affectionate men, a couples portrait that may be a record of a homosexual relationship or a celebration of a socially-sanctioned "romantic friendship," not uncommon during the time it was made. The ambiguity of the image and Deitcher's self-conscious reading through the lens of contemporary queer theory make the essay a constructive exercise in the pleasures, problems and stakes involved in reading queer or queered images. Describing his personal journey with the image, a process marked by desire and flirtation, Deitcher discusses the importance of acknowledging and celebrating personal investments in historical images of same-sex love: cryptic images may be traces of a deeply repressed history of homosexuality in Western culture. "[Q]ueer men and women are justified in maintaining a certain skepticism regarding the historian's positivistic and empirical method, and may therefore be inclined to attend to the quirks of individual and collective appetites and enthusiasms, permitting them to guide archival research," Deitcher concludes.

Kaucyila Brooke's "Roundabout" is another example of a very personal, anecdotal, autobiographical and literary form of academic writing that succeeds. She demonstrates and amplifies theoretical points through a web of personal stories. Reflections on driving on the left side of the road through a traffic circle introduce her arguments about having to go back into history in order to move ahead. Brooke recalls her own past through stories about her photographic portraits of lesbians in the South-west, marginalization by some in the lesbian community for loving men and her experience as the only lesbian in her MFA program during the mid-80s. These experiences led her to investigate the past for a history of lesbian photography. She wrote to Berenice Abbot, who photographed many women in the 1920s and whose negative response to Brooke's project (Abbott's letter is reproduced) included, "I am a photographer, not a lesbian." Brooke's essay turns to Brassai's photographs of the vibrant lesbian nightlife in Paris in the 1930s. She engages the images with narratives that begin to match (both autobiographically and fictionally) her identity with those of the voiceless lesbians in Brassai's photographs. A poignant dialogue results, allowing Brooke to effectively "talk" to Brassai about lesbian invisibility and the betrayal of history.

The unbalanced and unproductive examples of personal criticism, on the other hand, follow overused, formulaic styles of incorporating the personal into otherwise traditionally academic texts. The personal "aside," an italicized rupture within the flow of the argument, fails to enhance Paul B. Franklin's and Stephens's essays. Instead, these digressions compromise what would otherwise be interesting essays. In Franklin's "Orienting the Asian Male Body in the Photography of Yasumasa Morimura," the author provides rich readings of Morimura's ouevre (although excessive reliance on orthodox art historical methods can be a bit dull). For some inexplicable reason, however, Franklin also resorts to "asides" of autobiographical narratives - of he and his sister exploring each other's naked bodies as children - that just do not seem to accomplish enough to justify their inclusion. Even weaker, though, is Stephens's "Looking-Class Heroes: Dykes on Bikes Cruising Calendar Girls," in which the author examines her own provocative work on "revisiting and working with cliches of female sexuality" as it relates to her childhood fascination with the calendar girls in her father's shop and her adult participation in dyke-biker culture. Stephens's essay, based on personal reflection, is engaging and her accompanying posed photographs of contemporary butch dyke bikers and dyke femmes as calendar girls are fabulous, but the erotic "asides" seem out of synch with the rest of the essay. These erotic interludes can be laughable (but not in a critically humorous way) as she "speaks" to the subjects/objects of her camera/desire. In reference to one image, Stephens imagines herself as a "wily Br'er Rabbit" and writes the following erotic fantasy:

Olivia, you rich little slut . . . You think I'm your personal grease monkey, that I'll check under your hood to test how wet your silk panties are. I'd be happy to check you out but you want more than a simple tuneup, you want a full service job. As I adjust your belts you make it clear that you want the tension tighter. As I check your pressure, you say pump it up; you say that you can hardly feel anything. I thought that you didn't know much about mechanics, but you know what you want and you make me work hard to give it to you.

Stephens suggests that she is using camp, but this and the other erotic dialogues seem too earnest. Her images are powerful because they suggest erotic fantasies that can remain ambiguous, changeable and forever fresh and hot. By trapping the images in hackneyed language Stephens seems to trivialize her own photographic fantasies.

The Harris brothers, unfortunately, also explain away the frisson of their work in "Black Widow: A Conversation," a transcribed discussion on their collaborative Polaroid series (from which the beautiful image on the book's cover is taken) on biblical tropes of brotherhood, heroic fraternal warriors of mythology and Yoruba tradition. They justify their mini-autobiography by relying on Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s writings on the importance of autobiography in black literary traditions. The Harris brothers' artistic work, ideal personal criticism in practice, is traceable to this vibrant legacy, but this written casual dialogue does not do justice to their familial, cultural and personal artistic histories. The issues they discuss deserve to be worked out in a book or essay that is treated with the same care that they use to work on their images. The personal criticism presented is banal and absurd. When Lyle Ashton Harris says, "Over the past few years I've been actively engaging and processing my feelings around Daddy's absence, and how this set up a mechanism in which you and I were competing for Mom's attention," or Thomas Allen Harris says, "So we have this - there is this psychic connection. The thing exists. We talk about psychic space; it's a very real space we're talking about . . . It was so intense to leave the therapy session owning our feelings, sometimes not even speaking to each other," it is too easy to dispel these confessions as pure psycho-babble and New Agey schlock, instead of honoring their attempts to grapple with the spiritual and cultural hybridization evident in their intense photographs.

The book contains a couple of oft-reproduced pieces, such as the overused "Rock Hudson's Body" (1991) by Richard Meyer. The Passionate Camera as a whole, however, makes invaluable contributions to the field with superlative new essays by David Joselit on Morrisroe's manipulation of film negatives, Erica Rand on strategizing political uses of images, Mysoon Rizk on Wojnarowicz's early series "Arthur Rimbaud in New York" and Alisa Solomon on a theory of butch theatricality and the unsettling of gender categories. The most exceptional new work comes from Linda Dittrnar, Liz Kotz, Jose Esteban Munoz and Mary Patten.

Dittmar's "The Straight Goods: Lesbian Chic and Identity Capital on a Not-So-Queer Planet" is a brilliant socio-economic analysis of the dramatic increase in lesbian visibility in the mainstream press of the early '90s. Instead of resulting in real changes in lesbians' lives, Dittmar writes, market forces ensured that "'[l]esbian chic' reverted to plain 'chic,' with the 'L' word erased and forgotten." In contrast to the uncritical celebration of lesbians in fashion photography, Dittmar poses critical questions that challenge the identification being proffered: who makes these clothes? (underpaid and overworked women and children of the Third World?); who can afford them?; what colonial privileges do they signify?; and what racist messages do they propagate? These images of luxury and commodification, Dittmar writes, "help consumers mediate fields of desire, but they do so within a system of use and exchange that diverts the progressive potential of lesbian visibility away from political thinking . . . In short, fashion photography's 'lesbian' has become a mere repository for the hegemonic values which sustain the social and economic stratification of late capitalism."

"Aesthetics of 'Intimacy,'" by Kotz, is a forceful critique of the uncritical reception given to "insider" documentary photography, especially the work of Nan Goldin and, more recently, Richard Billingham. Kotz points out how Goldin's work is widely available, lushly reproduced and how her style has been appropriated by conventional advertising campaigns. This overexposure, she argues, has worked against the supposed "intimacy" of these images; they "cease to be poignant, and instead become trite, coded, formulaic: an index of bland liberal humanism rather than acute social difference . . . few things are more repellent than a programmed sense of 'intimacy' or a regulated experience of 'accident.'" Kotz's most cutting critique is of the critics and scholars who, along with the artist herself, have claimed that Goldin's work is "not voyeuristic." Kotz writes:

Presented under the guise of an "intimate" relationship between artist and subject, these images relegitimize the codes and conventions of social documentary, presumably by ridding them of their problematic enmeshment with histories of social surveillance and coercion. Such blind faith in authorial self-understanding and intention, however, ignores the extraordinary power of the photographic language employed: a language with a history and an inscribed structure of power relations that cannot be easily evaded by the spontaneous performance before the lens.

Using more carefully theorized work by Jack Pierson and Morrisroe as foil, Kotz shows how Goldin and her supporters cannot be excused for naively forgetting (e.g. repressing) the past 20 years of theory and critical work on the photographic transaction between artist and subject.

Munoz, in "Rough Boy Trade: Queer Desire/Straight Identity in the Photography of Larry Clark," argues that desire for "trade," the rough and straight-acting boys that have always been a staple in the gay male culture's erotic imagination, is implicated in both the constructions of heterosexuality and homosexuality. Munoz does not attempt a "gaying" of Clark or his subjects, although Clark's photographing sexually explicit scenes of teenage boys is, as Munoz points out, a very "queer act." "Everything that happens prior to, after, alongside and outside of this act is about (re)establishing heterosexuality." Clark, unfortunately, withheld permission to have his images reproduced, so Munoz's astute and sophisticated formal analyses of the images and their accompanying text (by Clark) are left less accessible.

Finally, in "The Thrill is Gone: An ACT UP Post-Mortem (Confessions of a Former AIDS Activist)," Patten revisits the work of ACT UP/Chicago and her personal involvement with the use of images in activism. The minor successes and, in retrospect, serious shortcomings of the group's activist images are explored in the personal "aside" construction that pauses after each section with a non-academic address. Patten, an excellent writer, makes this format work. After discussing some of the group's most visual actions - the use of "freedom beds and death beds" (actual beds) in street theater/protest, the Randolph Street Gallery's "Your Message Here" billboard project and the hilarious Women's Caucus's "Power Breakfast" T-shirt (this caption accompanies an image of dykes enjoying cunnilingus) - Patten (like Bright and Dittmar) criticizes the way increased queer visibility has often resulted in the construction of another market, not another politics. She writes, "when this product identification and consumption is perceived as identical with politics, we are in trouble - for example, when the mere presence of a red ribbon is seen as a marker of 'AIDS Awareness,' or the buying and wearing of red ribbon jewelry and rainbow flags at gay bookstores is constituted as a political act." Patten calls for a reclamation of a politicized queer identity instead of a comfortable assimilation into the white middle class mainstream.

The Passionate Camera will surely be widely used as an indispensible theoretical and historical document on queer visual culture at the end of the millennium. It has endless potential as a course textbook and library resource. The contributors' confident and committed collective gaze rests on a troubled past and on an unsettling present, but they all reassert the besieged queer body of desire into the future. Lord, in her story "Looking for My Museum," summarizes this urgency in her vivid description of attempting to bring the often hermetic queer past, here represented as a butch from another era, into the present and future:

Now that I can map her history on to my desire, now that it's too late, I know that every atom of her body had been irrevocably altered by a litany beyond my imagining - police beatings, rape, evictions, firing without notice or explanation, medical abuse, endless small stupid everyday humiliations . . . I learned the long way round, not by listening to Marion, who understood the value of silence, who would have seen no reason to relive her pain for a woman who would not comfort her with her body, the only way it could possibly have counted. I learned to map her, body and soul, by means she would have mocked, the books and the libraries, the careful collections that gave me the stories of those like her and those who wished her dead.

ELOY J. HERNANDEZ is living in Philadelphia and working on a doctoral dissertation on popular culture, HIV/AIDS education and urban youth.