Book Review The Sleepers Photographs by Sophie Calle Reviewed by Britland Tracy “It’s 5:00pm on Monday, April 1st, 1979, and Sophie Calle has one rule: her bed must be occupied at all times, between now and 10:00am next Monday. She has a plan, or so she thinks, because she has meticulously scheduled twenty-seven friends, friends-of-friends, and curious or bored strangers to come over to her apartment and sleep in her bed with the chronological synchronicity of a relay race..."

The Sleepers 

by Sophie Calle. 

The Sleepers
Photographs by Sophie Calle
Siglio Press, 2024. 304 pp., 6x8".

It’s 5:00pm on Sunday, April 1st, 1979, and Sophie Calle has one rule: her bed must be occupied at all times, between now and 10:00am next Monday. She has a plan, or so she thinks, because she has meticulously scheduled twenty-seven friends, friends-of-friends, and curious or bored strangers to come over to her apartment and sleep in her bed with the chronological synchronicity of a relay race. Logistically, she has prepared a menu to offer upon arrival or departure, fresh sheets if desired, a voice recorder, a camera, and a questionnaire through which these volunteers will divulge everything from their dreams to their occupations to their histories of bed-wetting. Symbolically, she has purchased a goldfish which will stand watch in her bedroom to demarcate this week of…art? labor? slumber exchange? espionage? That is for the “sleepers” to define.

But, but, but: Bob the Trumpeter needs to take a bath. Graziella and Françoise insist on airing out the room first. Maxine will only settle into a nap if his coworker joins him. X the Babysitter’s jealous fiancé would prefer she take the sofa. Jean-Yves Le Gavre is day-drunk and running three hours behind, Marino is four hours late, and Maggie has altogether disregarded the appointment. Henri-Alexis doesn’t like the magnetic aura of the sheets. Once in bed, their needs lengthen, and nothing short of Valium, sex, silk pajamas, a book, a beer, a gust of fresh air, the radio, a phone call, a cigarette, silence, closed doors, open windows, a wall-and-pillow fortress, and/or their dog will suffice as a tranquilizer. Sophie’s Sleepers are in fact human beings, still very much awake, with eccentricities and predilections and some apprehensions about why exactly they have agreed to crawl into her bed in the first place. And so her game begins.

A Sophie Calle Project is at its best when its initial scheme grows legs and runs circles around itself, persuading happenstance and human error to disrupt the rulebook, and that is precisely what unfolds throughout this week. Her subjects push back. They answer her questions with meandering diatribes or not at all. They’re annoyed or hungry or lusty or not yet tired. They’re laid bare in their idiosyncrasies yet remain impenetrable; they know they’re being watched. Voyeurism is a reciprocal mirror, and the specimens placed under glass have some observations about their examiner: “She’s mad.” / “This needs to stop, this acting like a social lunatic who asks questions and says nothing about herself.” / “Sophie, really, I find this a bit excessive. You’re spying on the most intimate moments. It’s unacceptable. If this is how it’s going to be, we’ll go to sleep.”

To follow the rules and fall asleep in her bed is, ironically, the eject button out of her game. Sleep is the least interesting thing that can happen here.

Les Dormeurs was Calle’s first major project and a harbinger of what was to become of her now half-century career as an artist-writer-investigator of the human condition, and it has at long last arrived stateside as The Sleepers by way of Siglio Press and translator Emma Ramadan. The book itself is an intimate object whose tactility falls somewhere between a pillow and a sacred text, with its cushioned navy cover and three hundred silver gilded pages. It is meant to be read and regarded in equal measure, as images follow the lead of their textual counterparts, cataloging one sleeper after the next and confirming in black-and-white evidence what Calle has recorded in words. Look, there really were people in her bed. This man was a mouth-breather; this woman was nude. A tangle of limbs here; a snuggling cat there. Here they laid awake, smoking cigarettes before breakfast, sipping champagne, reading a newspaper, buttoning a shirt, staring back at the camera, greeting the next in line. The photographs of these gestures are grainy and monotone and satisfying in the way that crime scene photographs are satisfying – not for their technical craftsmanship but rather for the matter-of-fact secrets they reveal for our visual consumption.

It could go without saying that The Sleepers is not about sleeping, but rather those vulnerable, banal threshold moments usually shrouded by the curtain of night and solitude. If there is a narrative to be found in this game, it resides in the very peculiarities that render these participants insubordinate to its “stay in bed” rule – much in the same way a lover’s scrupulous nail clipping routine delivers more intrigue than whether or not they happen to snore. If one dies as one lives, then perhaps sleeping is the next best parallel lens we have onto the precarious business of living.

In the wake of this experiment, Calle would go on to, among other things, excavate occupied hotel rooms under the auspices of a chamber maid; hire a private detective to shadow her; follow a man to Venice for a whisper of a reason; publicly dissect a breakup letter, an abandoned address book, and her own mother’s death with the surgical aloofness that has become her signature affect and greatest tool. But first, she asked people to sleep in her bed, that unruly horizontal stage on which we spend a third of our lives, and documented their prostrate improvisations.

Now it is 10:00am on Monday, April 9th, 1979, and Sophie Calle has made a heap of concessions, inserted herself and her family members as bed doubles for some absentees, and gradually neglected her questionnaire. She has absorbed the trepidations of her sleepers and acquiesced to their chaos. They have run circles around her, and taking their cue, the goldfish has leapt from its bowl to its demise. Her gaze slackens; there is no one left to watch. She strips the sheets. The unraveling becomes this book.

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Britland Tracy is an artist and educator from the Pacific Northwest whose work engages photography, text, and ephemera to observe the intricacies of human connection and discord. She has published two books, Show Me Yours and Pardon My Creep, and exhibited her work internationally. She holds a BA in French from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of Colorado, where she continues to teach remotely for the Department of Critical Media Practices while living in Marfa, Texas.

Book Review Journey to the Center of the Earth Photographs by Tiane Doan na Champassak Reviewed by Britland Tracy “What was your favorite book growing up? This was a question posed over dinner by a multi-hyphenate novelist at an artist residency I recently attended, comprising mostly Young Adult writers who ponder the adolescent reading experience in ways that I, a child-free visual artist, do not..."

Journey to the Center of the Earth 

by Tiane Doan na Champassak. 

Journey to the Center of the Earth
Photographs by Tiane Doan na Champassak
the (M) éditions, Paris, France, 2024. French, 224 p pp., 56 photographs, 6½x10¾".

What was your favorite book growing up? This was a question posed over dinner by a multi-hyphenate novelist at an artist residency I recently attended, comprising mostly Young Adult writers who ponder the adolescent reading experience in ways that I, a child-free visual artist, do not. The question intrigued me as it inspired a round-table discussion among accomplished adults — New York Times bestselling authors, screenwriting professors, award-winning composers, graphic novelists — reminiscing over Star Wars and The Babysitters Club with what I can only describe as high-brow earnestness. The obvious fact I had failed to realize until that moment was that childhood stories brand our psyches forever, that what we devour ravenously and repeatedly are one of few choices we are free to make for ourselves at a young age. These fictions can enhance an already enchanting upbringing or salve a bad one. Whichever respectable titles you announce as a respectable adult performing cultural literacy before other respectable adults will never hold a candle to that one book — you know which one — that transformed protracted afternoons into timeless portals a decade or five ago.

For artist Tiane Doan Na Champassak, that one book was Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth — the tale of a German mad scientist who, in search of volcanic tubes extending to the center of the earth, joins forces with his nephew and a subterranean tour guide to dive through Mesozoic strata, prehistoric creatures, and otherworldly phenomena by entering an inactive volcano in Iceland and erupting back to Earth’s surface through an active one in Italy, with all of the requisite lessons and gambles along the way. This literary expedition is punctuated with fifty-six illustrations by Édouard Riou, and together these pictures and words entered the canon of early science fiction.

Champassak’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, recently published by The(m) Éditions, is in conversation with Jules Verne in as much as it is with the artist’s boyhood self. In it, the photographer sets out on his own journey — not to the center of the earth, but to Laos, home of Xe Bang Faï, one of the world’s largest river caves most easily accessed via kayak spelunking. He documents this geologic wonder on color film and returns home. He then superimposes his pictures over Riou’s illustrations; fifty-six photographs of the river, alternatively processed with unspecified “unusual substances” which alchemize a diaphanous grotto into aqueous abstractions. Was Xe Bang Faï the “center of the earth” for the artist, his own dreamt odyssey realized in adulthood? I can only imagine so.

There are a few entry points into this hefty tome of a Hero’s Journey-turned-artist book. To begin, I should mention that its narrative text is entirely in French. It is, in fact, a perfect facsimile of an early edition of Verne’s Voyage au Centre de la Terre, published in the late nineteenth century in the heart of Paris and presumably mimicking the version Champassak first encountered in his youth. So, if you are a lapsed or aspiring francophone, wanting to level up from Le Petit Prince but not yet ready to delve into Colette or the grammatical Mount Everest that is Proust, alors, ce livre est pour vous.

Language lesson aside, this reconceptualized version of Journey to the Center of the Earth is a sumptuous visual object; relatively narrow and long, and hardbound in a satiny emerald green. It is substantial, like an imperial object anchored to a grandfather’s bookshelf. The titular front matter is debossed into the jewel-toned cover; an elegant invitation to touch. Each C-print of the river cave is only partially adhered to its corresponding illustration, which allows for a tactile game of hide-and-seek and serves as a reminder that découpage was invented by the French. The pages are matte, textured, and studded with a constellation of ink blots and blemishes, while the photographs that appear every couple of turns provide a counterpoint of saturated, velvety sleekness. If you’ve ever dabbled in papyrophilia, been seduced by stationary too good to use, used the term “chromatic variation”, “cotton rag”, or “GSM” to describe paper in casual conversation, then might I suggest that you peruse the backlog of The(m) Éditions titles. They are a consummate book lover’s book maker.

Finally, the images: a scavenger hunt of gemstones, brilliantly incorporated into the text and thus easily overlooked as their own sparkling objects. Celadon and cobalt and charcoal swirl and bubble to the photographic surface in a variety of liquified forms, obscuring the mysteriously delineated human silhouettes that occasionally appear like tiny Matisse drawings in a midnight swimming pool. The photographs invite imagination and wonder by suggesting more than they describe, and while they could be renderings of a Laotian river cave or underground volcanic tubes or even the walls of Lascaux, that is hardly the point. To encounter this book is to return ever so briefly to a childhood fantasy, but better, with twice the number of pictures.

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Britland Tracy is an artist and educator from the Pacific Northwest whose work engages photography, text, and ephemera to observe the intricacies of human connection and discord. She has published two books, Show Me Yours and Pardon My Creep, and exhibited her work internationally. She holds a BA in French from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of Colorado, where she continues to teach remotely for the Department of Critical Media Practices while living in Marfa, Texas.

Book Store Interview Men Untitled Photographs by Carolyn Drake Interview by Britland Tracy “If you listen closely to almost any human being who has recently acquired a dreamhouse, certain noises will emerge once the welcoming dog-and-pony show comes to a close and the cheese plates disappear..."

Men Untitled by Carolyn Drake. 

Men Untitled
Photographs by Carolyn Drake
Interview by Britland Tracy
TBW Books, Oakland, 2023. Unpaged, 9x11¾".

Recipient of the 2021 HCB Award, Carolyn Drake levels her gaze on myths of American male power in her newest photo-book and accompanying exhibition, Men Untitled, which opened at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in September. Portraits of men encountered and often befriended read like past-their-prime Renaissance statues, if Michelangelo had put David out to pasture for forty years before gently bending him over on all fours. Evocative objects whose symbolic relevance extend generations serve as punctuating double-entendres. The cultural reckoning at play is both visceral and encrypted. I had the pleasure of meeting Carolyn at her book talk in Paris and engaging in the following conversation.

Britland Tracy: These images are complicated — both in the book and on the wall. It would be easy to say that you are reversing the male gaze by photographing these men on your terms and in various states of undress. But rather than sexualizing them for visual consumption, as male artists have historically represented women, you’re placing them in positions that oscillate between tenderness and exploitation; vulnerability and playful absurdity. Some of them appear Herculean; some are Sisyphean. How did you find that balance?    

Carolyn Drake: I am a 52-year-old woman who has internalized a lot of personal and political rage over the years, most recently in response to the #MeToo movement and the U.S. Supreme Court decision on abortion rights. My hormonal impulses are also shifting. I wanted to channel all that onto the men: how can I subjugate the male body, and how will that look and feel to me?   

But on the other hand, photography for me is a way of connecting and empathizing with other people. So as I played with how it felt to look down on men and to mangle and twist and direct their bodies, I also found tenderness and began to see the ways they were fragile, and not at all fulfilling masculine stereotypes.   

I also wanted to look at the myths connected to masculine ideals, but without perpetuating them. The images are constructed, posed. I did not want to insinuate any of this as natural, so the feeling of staging and performance was important to me. 

BT: I imagine that the power dynamics you navigated for this work were quite different from the approach you took with your last book, Knit Club, which centered around a community of women in rural Mississippi. There seems to be a tension between collaboration and compromise with your subjects in Men Untitled. For example, you promised Wallace, one of the main ‘characters’, the centerfold, but only if you posed for him first. Can you speak to these dynamics a bit?   

CD: One of the main differences in the way I approached the men as photographic subjects is that I wanted to expose the vulnerability of their bodies and lay them bare. Whereas in Knit Club I searched for other ways to explore bonds and identities.   

Wallace is a character I got to know pretty well over many photo shoots. Before he passed away in 2022, he ran a motorcycle club next to his house, and the inside, notably, was wallpapered floor to ceiling and all over the ceiling with centerfolds from Penthouse and Playboy magazines that he had collected over the years. This was always something on my mind when I visited his house to photograph him, so when one day he showed me an old picture he had taken of an ex-girlfriend, I knew I wanted to ask him if he would be willing to pose for me in the same position. He agreed to let me photograph him hanging upside down from a hook like a piece of meat only if I would also, and it felt natural for me to agree to it. What I chose not to do is publish the image he took of me. That final decision of what to show is where my power resides. This is about me authoring male bodies, not the reverse.

The women in Knit Club didn’t demand anything in return. They respected my authority as the photographer. The men sometimes asked for money to be photographed. Maybe there’s some irony in that.  

BT: You include a lot of still life images that serve as signifiers of heteronormative masculinity: guns, shop tools, fire, horses, centaurs, swords, etc.; but you also include a corset mannequin, a dramatically lit tapestry, a nod to the “hidden mothers” of Victorian-era portraiture, as well as an actual self-portrait. What inspired this combination of gendered iconography?   

CD: My images contain these signifiers but I am tweaking the way they are displayed. My piano, a symbol seen a lot in depictions of 19th century gender relations, is burning to ash. I multiply guns using mirrors. I stick swords in the ground and compare their sizes. In all of this imagery, I’m overtly pushing and pulling at gender constructs. I draw on dated gender symbols because I think they still inform where we are now.   

BT: You sought out what appear to be cis-men ‘of a certain age’ as models for this project, bypassing youth and queer identities altogether. Why?   

CD: The men weren’t all cis, actually, but I didn’t distinguish one way or another in the image titles. It’s not a project about youth culture and the diversification of gender identities. It’s about my feelings toward old guard gender structures whose power remains entrenched, and about how I too relate to individual people on that spectrum.  Part of why I worked mostly with older men was that I wanted to see masculine strength in decline.  

BT: The role of text in this book is subtle yet powerful. I enjoy the way you circumnavigate the rote artist statement and instead leave us with an image list and a series of unsettling vignettes from your own past experiences with men, tucked away inside the epilogue. The titles listed on the back cover and the endpapers serve as both index and map legend for the ineffable portraits that precede them. Descriptions such as “Still Life, Male Anatomy on Velvet Chair”, “Bottom Half of Mythical Figure”, “Dartboard Halo (Bill)”, and “Man on All Fours (John D)” almost read like a list of trophies, subverting victim and victor. Did the written components guide your creative process, or vice-versa?   

CD: The ideas for the images came first. For example: while trying to see men as animals, I brought John D. into the woods and asked him to pose as a deer so I could ‘shoot’ him. We had to do the shoot twice because the first time around he didn’t look enough like an animal.  For “Dartboard Halo”, I had been studying a women’s beauty and charm guide from the 1940s. In one image, a cutout of a woman’s head in front of a circle is tilted back with an open mouth. I invited Bill to stand in front of a dartboard in his studio and mimic her posture.    

The image list provides ideas for how to read the images. I put it at the end, so they can be read all together, at once, and so I could stack them on top of each other to form a suggestive shape.   

I also like what you say about subverting victim and victor. I am not trying to win anything here. I want to deflate a set of power dynamics that we’re invested in, often without realizing it. It sounds heavy, but hopefully the work also rings with a bit of humor.   

BT: Speaking of the personal self-disclosures in the back of the book, I’d like to talk about anger. It is a word that you’ve used to describe the impetus for photographing men in the American South, and there is a palpable indignation that builds from one image to the next. Anger is an emotion that women are often pressured to soften, but you seem to embrace it as an activating force for this project. The violations you recount in the epilogue certainly warrant this response. What is your relationship to anger toward men, and has it changed through the process of creating this body of work?    

CD: In the text at the back of the book, I wrote about Christine Blasey Ford, who spoke publicly about being sexually assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh as he was on the verge of becoming a U.S. Supreme Court Justice (and subsequently repealing abortion rights for women). In the public hearing, Kavanaugh’s anger was palpable, while Ford’s was concealed. It should have been the reverse.  On top of that, the succession of public disclosures by women during the #MeToo movement triggered memories of past personal experiences that fueled more anger. Women’s bodies do carry anger, so it is absolutely something I wanted to channel into the work. 

I had to let myself feel two things at once while making this project — anger I had boxed in and the empathy needed to make human portraits. One of the things they remind you in psychotherapy is that contradictory feelings can coexist.  

Regarding geography, the American South is where I began, but I eventually decided that the project is not about a particular region. It’s about an American brand of patriarchy and its strange attachment to white penises. 

BT: There are a number of references to iconic male artists from the past, from Eadweard Muybridge to Peter Hujar to E.J. Bellocq to Caravaggio. Do you see yourself in conversation with or resistance to these men, or somewhere in between?   

CD: Most of the time I’m somewhere in between. I wanted to resist Muybridge’s “scientific” view of gender difference. In his motion studies, nude women pour vases of water over each other while nude men have sword fights. I wanted to subvert that science.    

While I am in awe of the sensuality of Peter Hujar’s nudes, I have to confess that my point of view is different. My male bodies don’t hold that amount of erotic energy.   

I’m also interested in the work of female artists like Ishiuchi Miyako, Collier Schorr, Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman, Claude Cahun, Ana Mendieta. And the ways that Laura Larson and Ahndraya Parlato have recently used writing in their photo books.   

BT: Men Untitled opened at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris in conjunction with the book publication, within a country where most civilians do not have the right to bear arms and a language in which words like ‘debonair’ and ‘suave’ were invented to describe men with sexual prowess rather than say, ‘rugged individualism’ or ‘lone wolf’. Has the process of exhibiting and speaking about this project abroad affected the way you think about this particular brand of American masculinity?    

CD: The work stems from the inclinations of an American, but a lot of people in France are exposed to American ideals of masculinity through Hollywood films, so I think ‘rugged individualism’ is not totally unfamiliar in the French context. And Americans can also feel the appeal of a suave French man.  I think maybe showing the work in France helped me take a step back and see it more from the outside. And also step back from the emotions, which I’m still pretty wound up in.

BT: The final image depicts a man curled toward the ground in a duck-and-cover stance, wearing nothing but a pair of sneakers. Is this an act of contrition? Repentance? Protection? Cowardice? It feels like a definitive last word. 

CD: I see the curled man both as an infant and as someone bracing for punishment. It reminded my publisher of Wolfgang Tillmans’ picture Like Praying. When the meaning is not directly spelled out, the viewer can draw their own conclusion. 

On the very last page of the book, we almost included a mold of a human figure that is either waving farewell or calling for help. We cut it out at the last minute. Either image could have become the definitive last word.

Carolyn Drake’s exhibition Men Untitled is on view at the Fondation HCB in Paris through January 14th, 2024.

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Britland Tracy is an artist and educator from the Pacific Northwest whose work engages photography, text, and ephemera to observe the intricacies of human connection and discord. She has published two books, Show Me Yours and Pardon My Creep, and exhibited her work internationally. She holds a BA in French from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of Colorado, where she continues to teach remotely for the Department of Critical Media Practices while living in Marfa, Texas.

Book Review My Dreamhouse is not a House Photographs by Julia Gaisbacher Reviewed by Britland Tracy “If you listen closely to almost any human being who has recently acquired a dreamhouse, certain noises will emerge once the welcoming dog-and-pony show comes to a close and the cheese plates disappear..."

My Dreamhouse is not a House by Julia Gaisbacher. 

My Dreamhouse is not a House
Photographs by Julia Gaisbacher
The Velvet Cell, Berlin, 2023. 160 pp., 8¼x11".

If you listen closely to almost any human being who has recently acquired a dreamhouse, certain noises will emerge once the welcoming dog-and-pony show comes to a close and the cheese plates disappear. The living room will be perfect once we repaint that accent wall. The kitchen just needs a new backsplash. The condo board won’t allow radiant heating in the bathroom floors. The builders really cut some corners with the tile caulking.

Perhaps there is a glimmer of delight in the perpetual dissatisfaction, providing both dinner party fodder and an existential tooth to wiggle like a hobby. As Frasier declares in that one episode where he and Niles return from a French restaurant probably complaining about the cognac (to be clear, this is every Frasier episode): “What is the one thing better than an exquisite meal? An exquisite meal with one tiny flaw we can pick at all night.” Either way, a dreamhouse is often a lifehack to ensure that something is forever not quite right.

These are monied complaints, of course. Enough to buy or build the place; not enough to demo the whole thing to the ground and start over. What you don’t often hear amongst these homeowners are statements like: “I shared a bedroom with my mother before moving into this house”, or, “I knew I wanted a bathroom because I’d never had one before”, or, “It’s going to take me eighteen years to replace this cabinet.” Dreamhouse problems, after all, are still designed for people who can afford to dream.

Yet these are the paraphrased sentiments encountered between images in Julia Gaisbacher’s My Dreamhouse is not a House, a photographic compendium of the Gerlitzgründe, the renowned architect Eilfried Huth’s radically experimental social housing project constructed in Graz, Austria, between 1976 and 1984. Government subsidized housing was not the novel idea in this time and place, but rather the participatory nature of the project with its prospective residents. Huth consulted each family on the design of their future home, from drawing up blueprints to breaking ground to installing the flooring. Hands-on involvement in building these structures was optional and offered as a means for inclusive ownership, instead of alienated labor. He defined a dreamhouse as “daydreams, places, spaces, landscapes, where experiences fleetingly encounter desires”, and believed that “human existence in the house is what matters, the house is just a shell” –- an architectural philosophy much more aligned with Gaston Bachelard than HGTV.

To peruse this book is to oscillate between two books, or rather, to take a leisurely stroll through a present-day neighborhood of charming pastel façades before being invited inside for a private tour down memory lane and a meet-and-greet with the neighbors from yesteryear. My Dreamhouse is indeed not a house, but a double-decker sandwich of imagery and text: three parts architecture, two parts archival photographs punctuated by first-person memories transcribed from a resident with a story to tell. Gaisbacher sequences her own deadpan photographs of each home’s exterior into an accordion layout bound at the seam, which smartly incentivizes the page turn, as a hexagonal robin’s egg roof picks up where a canary yellow porch leaves off, and lavender fades to sage, to apricot, to mint, to slate, to crimson, to midnight blue. No wonder this community was maligned as a ‘parrot settlement’ by its joyless onlookers who had yet to revive their achromatic souls.

Gaisbacher interrupts the lustrous color feast with black-and-white archival snapshots of the Gerlitzgründe and its interiors, printed on a rougher matte paper reminiscent of newsprint. She includes interview excerpts of one anonymous resident, whose anecdotes confirm that this communal endeavor was by no means a frictionless utopia. There were still cheaply made windows and neighbors who ran up the shared gas bill and mobility issues ameliorated with stairlifts in life’s later years. There were also pig roast potlucks and flea markets and children and couples dancing to live bands, whose photographic evidence features a lead singer whipping off his shoes and tie mid-performance.

There is a warmth in the cadence of these pages that belies the matter-of-factness in their compositions and chronologies, all of which seem to say: herein lies the minutiae and transcendence of a life shared with others; the human experience around which the shell is built. This book, much like Huth’s dreamhouse, is a meditation on one neighborhood’s legacy of community, on creative collaboration, on giving someone something to own, and watching them polish it.

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Britland Tracy is an artist and educator from the Pacific Northwest whose work engages photography, text, and ephemera to observe the intricacies of human connection and discord. She has published two books, Show Me Yours and Pardon My Creep, and exhibited her work internationally. She holds a BA in French from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of Colorado, where she continues to teach remotely for the Department of Critical Media Practices while living in Marfa, Texas.

Book Review Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes Photographs by Tarrah Krajnak Reviewed by Britland Tracy “I leaf through the fleshy end sheets that preface Tarrah Krajnak’s Master Rituals II: Edward Weston, struck with the realization that, on purpose, I have navigated adult life in the photo world with a now-conspicuous dearth of knowledge of almost all things Edward Weston..."

Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes. 

By Tarrah Krajnak.

Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes
Photographs by Tarrah Krajnak
TBW Books, Oakland, 2022. In English. 52 pp., 10x13½".

I leaf through the fleshy end sheets that preface Tarrah Krajnak’s Master Rituals II: Edward Weston, struck with the realization that, on purpose, I have navigated adult life in the photo world with a now-conspicuous dearth of knowledge of almost all things Edward Weston. Here is what I recall upon opening this book:

1. He kept his apertures small in the camera and tonal ranges large in the darkroom, and the history books all thank him for it.
2. He photographed the curves of a bell pepper like those of a woman, and vice-versa.

One can imagine that in Weston’s World, a bell pepper is perhaps the platonic ideal of a photographic subject: malleable, smooth but not shiny, organically contoured, inert yet anthropomorphic in the right light, at the right angle. It comes in a variety of skin tones: yellow, orange, red, green. And if it droops, wilts, rots, bruises, or was not a very appealing piece of produce in the first place, its fresher replacement is just a garden or grocery away. (I recently learned that, once his vegetal subjects began to sag, he ate them.) Parallel comparisons to portraits of faceless nude women from the last century are not hard lines to draw here.

Tarrah Krajnak reimagines herself as both bell pepper-woman and master-Weston through her series of seventeen black-and-white, large format, nude self-portraits, methodically sequenced on the right side of each spread with the gravitas of a twentieth-century virtuoso’s monograph — a formality that subverts this book’s exquisitely sardonic tone. She reincarnates the exact gestures of his female models (whose names, for historical record, were Charis Wilson and Bertha Wardell) in suspended animations of “bent over” and “holding ankle” and “standing from behind”. She employs materials outside the confines of herself and her camera as both assistants and partitions — cinder blocks, hefty rocks, white foam core board, plywood plinths — and often present in her images are Weston’s own portraits of fragmented women, lingering on the periphery as visual references. His legacy as a canonical photographer is relegated to instructional prop; Krajnak clicks the shutter.

This is how she lets us in on the joke, unveiling the smoke and mirrors of the medium through her own photographic mastery. She reveals the shutter release cord, the contortions required to simultaneously fragment choice curves of the body and compose the frame with self-possessed agency. Some photographs are printed directly onto the page as darkroom test strips, illuminating the extent to which her shadows and highlights can be manipulated — a decision fatigue which silver gelatin loyalists know all too well. With this fourth wall broken, Weston suddenly seems much less rarified.

There is an accelerating indignation in Master Rituals II that crescendos in what is plausibly the greatest centerfold-odalisque-reclining nude of all time, as Krajnak sprawls verso to recto against sheets of plywood and a fanned, spikey houseplant, armored with just a gas mask and an insubordinate gaze. After nearly a dozen portraits depicting a bended knee here and a twisted torso there, the curtain is pulled back on their maker. At last, a face. The face of a Peruvian-born, indigenous woman staring back at the camera while her presence is implied behind it. This picture is an outlier in that it reproaches nothing specific to Weston’s portfolio but rather all that is white, colonizing and heteronormative in the history of art about women idealized by men. It’s Guerrilla Girls-meets-Venus of Urbino.

The gas mask comes off in the final self-portrait, but Krajnak’s eye contact remains. She crosses her limbs but faces the camera. Her raised arm grips the shutter release and hovers above one last pair of Weston portraits: another contorted woman cropped at the neck on the left, and on the right, angled slightly away from the camera — what’s that? — the unmistakable Bell Pepper No. 30.

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Britland Tracy is an artist and educator from the Pacific Northwest whose work engages photography, text, and ephemera to observe the intricacies of human connection and discord. She has published two books, Show Me Yours and Pardon My Creep, and exhibited her work internationally. She holds a BA in French from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of Colorado, where she continues to teach remotely for the Department of Critical Media Practices while living in Marfa, Texas.