PHOTO | BRUT: Reviewed by Shannon Taggart

Book Review PHOTO | BRUT Collection Bruno Decharme & Compagnie Reviewed by Shannon Taggart "PHOTO | BRUT, the catalog for the eponymous exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, boldly proposes a new photographic genre with its title. Although the art market has accepted ‘outsider’ or ‘visionary’ art for decades, defining this category for photography is tricky. Democratic by nature, the camera invites untold numbers of amateurs to make pictures with its ease and availability. In the twentieth century, photography was only slowly taken seriously by museums and galleries, and its classification as ‘fine art’ is relatively recent. Bonafide masters of the medium — such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Ansel Adams, Sebastião Salgado, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard — are famously self-taught. How, then, is ‘Photo Brut’ determined?"

PHOTO | BRUT.

PHOTO | BRUT
Collection Bruno Decharme & Compagnie

Flammarion, 2020. 322 pp., 9¾x11x1¼".

PHOTO | BRUT, the catalog for the eponymous exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, boldly proposes a new photographic genre with its title. Although the art market has accepted ‘outsider’ or ‘visionary’ art for decades, defining this category for photography is tricky. Democratic by nature, the camera invites untold numbers of amateurs to make pictures with its ease and availability. In the twentieth century, photography was only slowly taken seriously by museums and galleries, and its classification as ‘fine art’ is relatively recent. Bonafide masters of the medium — such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Ansel Adams, Sebastião Salgado, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard — are famously self-taught. How, then, is ‘Photo Brut’ determined?

In essence, PHOTO | BRUT champions photographic works made with enigmatic purpose and without an art world intention. The contributors trace its lineage back to Jean Dubuffet’s 1940s conception of ‘Art Brut’ (Raw Art) — art ‘uncooked’ by cultural forces, made by creators working outside of the academy, often alone, or in institutions, hospitals, or prisons. Although related to vernacular photography, PHOTO | BRUT’s photographs, prints, photomontages, and photocollages defy the ‘daily life’ category in mind-boggling ways. The five hundred-plus pieces by fifty-three artists are spectacularly odd, emotionally explosive, and shockingly intimate. Despite the range of originality, biographical texts make clear that there is at least one thread uniting this unleashed creativity: trauma.

PHOTO | BRUT is a collection of visions inspired by psychological need. ‘Private Affairs’, the first of four sections, focuses on sexual desire, obsession, and fetish. Among the works are Morton Bartlett’s tender yet terrifying photos of handcrafted, anatomically correct child mannequins. Of these tableaux, Bartlett once said: “Its purpose is that of all proper hobbies—to let out urges that do not find expression in other channels.” The next category, ‘Reformatting the World,’ presents inspirations of epic proportion, such as Henry Darger’s enchanted masterpiece on the ‘Vivian Girls.’ The selections here speak to Darger’s process, revealing his use of commercial imagery to construct the intersex nymphs that fill his war-torn, watercolor world. The section ‘Performing, or Another I’ reinvents identity and gender. Amidst the self-portraiture is a series by Tomasz Machciński, known as the ‘man of a thousand faces.’ Machciński changes himself into both famous and unknown characters of different ages, sexes, and races. Of these documented metamorphoses, he states: “I don't use wigs, tricks, but I use everything that happens to my body, such as hair regrowth, tooth loss, diseases, aging, etc.”

The final chapter of PHOTO | BRUT concerns an area of photographic inquiry that has long stood outside of the canon. ‘Conjuring the Real: Spirits, Fluids and Threatening Forces’ addresses attempts to picture the invisible. It opens with John Brill’s ghostly images that mix analog and digital processes. Although Brill’s works are contemporary, their theme harkens back to photography’s earliest days, when some of the most prominent figures in Western culture tried to capture the supernatural with cameras. Among those distinguished researchers was Nobel Laureate in Medicine, Charles Richet. In 1919, Richet co-founded the Institut Métapsychique International in Paris, the source for many of PHOTO | BRUT’s examples of thoughtography, spirit photographs, and images of ectoplasm. This introduces one of Photo Brut’s most compelling aspects — exposing photography’s problem with truth. Paranormal experiments were the first to challenge the idea that cameras could faithfully record reality. The resulting images are among the most bizarre, absurd, and uniquely unsettling moments within the medium’s history.

The artists in PHOTO | BRUT externalize their inner worlds with photographs made or borrowed. Some also play with the artform’s stranger possibilities. Photography’s ability to freeze time and preserve disembodied presence connects it to ancient ideas about magic; the notions that a person’s soul is in their reflection or that the eye can cast a spell are among the world’s oldest superstitions. With examples such as Gunter K.’s sexual mementoes, Zdenêk Košek’s tattooed formulas, and Adolf Wölfli’s sigil-like collages, PHOTO | BRUT reconsiders the photograph as talisman. The book’s works plunge emotional depths, and their authenticity feels implicit. An uneasy realization affects the viewer — this art was not made for us, it has a private function. We were likely never meant to see these images, and maybe we shouldn’t be looking. PHOTO | BRUT celebrates photography’s feral features, inviting questions about voyeurism, transgression, myth-making, and transformation. Finally out from under the shadow of painting and embraced by the establishment, the medium’s full potential may now be ready for reassessment.

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Shannon Taggart is a photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been exhibited and featured internationally and has been recognized by Nikon, Magnum Photos and the Inge Morath Foundation, American Photography, and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace. Her first monograph, SÉANCE, was published by Fulgur Press in November 2019 and was named one of TIME’s best photobooks of the year.