Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance. (7)
-Tennessee Williams
IN HER INTRODUCTION to his first book, Native Soil, Ellen Douglass remarks that 'Jack Spencer's photographs-the faces, the stances, the staged presences-invite me first to think about stories" (1). Thus, she maintains, Spencer's photographs are rightly viewed as
art works in the same way that stories or songs or sculptures are art works. What the photographer has done in the darkroom to form his finished picture ranks at the same level of intensification as his choice of frame and image at the moment of snapping the shutter. Everything (at least to my untutored eye) seems as planned-as made-as a novel or a short story or a painting or a piece of music. (1)
With this description, Douglas locates Spencer's work within two persistent controversies about photography since the medium's official public unveiling in 1839: first, the fundamental issue of the degree to which photography, originating as it does in a "mechanical" process, may be considered a fine art; and second, a related aesthetic debate over the desirability of strict representational fidelity, or objective realism, in the photographic image. ' Any one of Spencer's remarkable photographs might be read as a composite response to these debates: of course photography is a fine art-but it becomes so through the photographer's willingness both to act on and to react to the subject in representing it.
Looking at Spencer's work, artistic intentions are evident. In his bold, large prints, typically 20" x 24", we immediately recognize a style developed in an attempt to communicate a vision. Though many of them depict the traditional, even iconographie, subjects of a documentary photographer, his images are not casual in any respect: we never face the question asked of some art photography: How is this, what looks on the surface like a snapshot, art?His photographs appear instead as renderings, constellations of tones and patterns that accumulate as impressions of women and men bearing the marks of age and time, youths parading their innocence, landscapes and houses or other human spaces that seem decidedly less literal than imagined, though clearly located somewhere. Indeed, if you didn't know that Spencer was from the South-born in Mississippi, raised in Louisiana, living and working now in Nashville-you might be inclined to suspect it based on the mood of his work. Echoing Faulkner's paradoxical sense of history, O'Connor's (but never Caldwell's) awareness of the grotesque, and Agee's sensitivity to the sad poetry of the material world, Spencer's hazy brown and sepia tones veil familiar-seeming subjects which appear to be trying to emerge into clarity, as if they were dreams or memories about to become real. Each of his images, including the collection from which Native Soil was drawn as well as his most recent series from Mexico, seems a very personal and individually achieved response to place. Photographs of actual places like "Tomotley Plantation" and "Sheldon Church Ruins," both in South Carolina, and "Blackjack Road" (Virginia), all from Native Soil, and newer pieces like "Pontalba" and "Fachada," all feel laden with memory, depictions of a present that reaches backward in time for its life and fullest meaning.
In the interviews he has given for various media profiles since the publication of Native Soil, Spencer has been forthcoming about his artistic aims. He describes his work as "expressionistic," meaning that for him photographs are always, regardless of their literal subject, "metaphors that represent something primal within myself as the artist, and also, hopefully in the viewer as well" (MVAI). In the history of photography, this self-definition links him in the history to the group loosely known as Pictorialists, who in the late nineteenth century, first in Europe and later in the United States, mounted the first serious challenge to the exclusion of photography as one of the fine arts. Writing in 1896, one of the founders of the Pictorialist school, Henry Peach Robinson, explained the evolution:
A pure, unadulterated machine-made . . . photograph, if colour is allowed for, is the most perfect specimen of realism the world could produce. ... In the early days we were surprised and delighted with a photograph, as a photograph, just because we had not hitherto conceived possible any definition or finish that approached nature so closely.... But soon we wanted something more. We got tired of the sameness of the exquisiteness of the photograph, and if it had nothing to say, if it was not a view, or a portrait of something or somebody, we cared less and less for it. Why? Because the photograph told us everything about the facts of nature and left out the mystery. Now, however hard-headed a man may be, he cannot stand too many facts; it is easy to get a surfeit of realities, and he wants a little mystification as a relief. (96)
For Robinson-as for others loosely affiliated with the Pictorialist movement, including Fred Holland Day, Julia Margaret Cameron, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Gertrude Kasebier, and Clarence White, and in their early work Alfred Steiglitz and Edward Steichen-the photographic negative and various chemical processes were akin to the palette of a painter, rich with options for manipulating the image to achieve a desired effect. Their work is characterized by soft focus, impressionistic figures and landscapes rendered in tonal ranges that tended to evoke-or to "mystify," to borrow Robinson's word-rather than merely record images.
Unlike the rich but very different documentary-style photography of some of his Southern contemporaries, such as John McWilliams, Rob Amberg, or Shelby Lee Adams, Spencer achieves the effect he desires-this expressionistic mystification of otherwise ordinary subjects and scenes-primarily through tireless work in the darkroom and further manipulations of the dry print in his studio afterward.2 In interviews, Spencer speaks of trying to capture and express "feeling," especially for the people and places of the Mississippi Delta and the Mexico of his more recentwork, as he "playfs] around" with his photographs (Bell 54). A "camera has a lot of limitations," he has said on several occasions. This may seem an odd statement for a photographer, but not one who considers the camera just one tool in the process of making art:
I think there's something deeper than just what's put on the film plane whenever you expose a negative. ... A lot of people will just go into the darkroom and slip a negative in, let the enlarger expose it and, Bam!, they get a print.... I try to dig around and find something that's a little bit more expressive. (Morris)
While fine, artistic photographs maybe made through literal representations of the subject-witness Amberg's recent Sodom Laurel Album-Spencer, who began his artistic life as a painter, feels compelled to go farther. The camera "can only record light and shadows," Spencer commented recently, "so I try to take the negative further and interpret it, extend it. In the darkroom, you're adding and subtracting light, dodging and brightening certain areas, and letting the light expose the paper even more." Obtaining the basic print is just the beginning of the creation of the image. Spencer follows that with other processes, often through multiple stages, to create the final effect he desires, including soaking the print in various (sometimes multiple) toning baths and, most recently, finishing it with the application of a tinted oleopasto coating applied to the print's surface, achieving a decidedly painterly effect (Dorian 79). With such an elaborate process of creation, each Jack Spencer photograph is relatively unique. Three samples of the same photograph are each likely to communicate a slightly different mood and tone, depending on the artist's inclinations as he worked to complete it.
Considering Spencer's technique, then, and his explanation of his artistic intentions, I would like to return to the comment from Ellen Douglass that I cited at the beginning of this essay and use her observation about the quality of Spencer's work to frame a discussion of how it aligns with a broader cultural tradition within which I believe it is most clearly understood: the Southern literary tradition.
Continued from page 1.
"I'll call anything a story," Flannery O'Connor wrote, "in which specific characters and events influence each other to form a meaningful narrative" ( "Nature" 66). For her, the "least common denominator" of all good storytelling is the element of "concrete [ness] ": "The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins," in contemplating and rendering in words "a world full of matter" (67). For Southern writers, from Mark Twain to William Faulkner, O'Connor to Eudora Welty, Harry Crews, and Ernest Gaines, the materiality of stories that gives them their fullest meaning is inevitably tied to place-to remembering and perceiving and interpreting. Of course, photographs do not necessarily contain words, but rely instead on a viewer's intellectual and emotional working-out of the details of an image, its matter, to arrive at understanding. Much the way readers of fiction "write" a story as they read it-as Barthes told us, the author "dies" at the moment of reading and making meaning through interpretation-viewers construct and invest narratives with meaning by animating the images, tones, and textures communicated or implied by the photograph. In the most successful photographs, as in the most successful works of literature, this process is dynamic, moving toward but finally resisting closure: a series of questions may feel more satisfactory than do definitive "answers" in determining a work's meaning. '
While the style of Spencer's photographs may be what initially attracts a viewer's attention, it is the observer's perception of the dynamic relationship between that style and their content that gives them narrative power. Spencer seems especially interested in a simultaneous exploitation and expansion of the connotative meanings that certain images have assumed when they are linked to Southern culture, particularly the rural South: evocative landscapes and time-worn buildings, suggestive portraits of people tired and poor, but possessing measures of dignity. Speaking rhetorically, we might call these visual tropes of Southernness-representations of familiar subjects that a rich history of documentary expression, especially since the 1930s, has invested with metaphorical and connotative possibilities for expressing aspects of Southernness.4 As all good photographers and indeed all serious artists who have paid attention to the South know, however, these figures are as seductive and dangerous as they are powerful. Representing a region that has been romanticized and vilified in equal doses, the artist has to take great care to avoid tripping on the thin line that divides original aesthetic exploration and mere régurgitation of stereotypes that invite easy emotional associations via sentimentality and nostalgia. In his ability to render some of the most conventionally Southern of images in a style that opens up narrative possibilities by actually defying preconception, then, we find Spencer's genius.
The photograph "Jimmie's Rooster" provides a good illustration of this. The image depicts a black man and a rooster in a rural yard. But the art of the photograph transcends these rather predictable elements, residing instead in the narrative possibilities they suggest. Dominating the frame, dead center, the foreground features a rather serious-looking mongrel rooster, his neck drawn down. He doesn't look comfortable, but neither does he appear particularly afraid. He is being held by someone whose shoulder is just barely visible in the lower right corner of the image. Emerging from the brown-washed haze of a tangled rural background is a young black man we at first presume to be Jimmie. The man is simply standing, chin tilted up, his head only half-visible, but enough so that we can see seriousness written in the dark tones around the area where his mouth should be. His right thumb is hooked in the front pocket of his trousers, the other hand hanging loose, open. In another version, the photograph might simply be a picture of a rooster whose fate appears uncertain at best. Through Spencer's presentation, however, the photograph develops as a dramatic moment for the viewer's imagination to set into motion: Has this mysterious young man come to retrieve Jimmie's rooster? Or is he Jimmie himself, giving his rooster away-or having caught someone stealing it? What scene is about to unfold, standing as they are in this cluttered, primeval place-these two men and this ancient symbol of masculinity as the single thing that binds them? We see similar photographs, narratives waiting to be written, in Native Soil images like "Baptismal Candidates" and "Brothers" and throughout the series of new work from Oxaca, Mexico, as well. "Ninas, Dia de Las Muertes," for example, depicts four beautiful children in ethereal dresses and wearing garish makeup for the Mexican Day of the Dead celebration, lined up and looking finally less like children than players in some literal pageant of life and death.
Of course, a narrative does not always require more than one character. Native Soil concludes with a remarkable series of nine photographs of an elderly black man Spencer met while traveling the Delta shooting photographs for that project. Mr. Will Branch, known to Spencer and his friends in Coila, Mississippi, as Cooler, is shown alone in a variety of scenes. Some of them, like "Cooter in the Horn with Corn," are humorous; others, like "Cooter at the Abyss" and "Cooter with Glass," seem staged in a calculated effort to approach the metaphysical. In the latter photograph, which depicts Cooler's massive black hands gripping the raw edges of a large sheet of cut rippled glass (lhe kind you mighl see in a shower door) as he holds il close before his face, Spencer offers a virtual study in perception, a denial of verisimilitude and transparency-a challenge Io push ourselves Io see details beyond lhe fillers lhat divide us racially and otherwise.
Perhaps the most arresting photographs of Cooter, however, are the two that begin the series, "Palriol No. 1 " and "Palriol No. 2." BoIh depict Cooler in a darkened room, framed from mid-chesl up and viewed lhrough a pane of glass. An American flag, visible as a single line of slars and awhile slripe, stands al Cooler's left shoulder, draping it in the second image. In the first photograph, large beads of rainwater sland on lhe glass; in lhe second, the waler is gone and some of the darkness has been replaced by the unforgiving glare of a single uncovered lamp bulb. The unified narrative these photographs suggesl is internal and subjective: a monologue of an aged man, living in physical poverty but carrying with him ideals for which he fought-or did his son?-and by which he still abides. Or so we may prefer to think. In the first photograph, Cooter appears to be straining to look back through the rain-beaded glass to see who is on the other side looking through it at him. In the second, he has withdrawn into a stoic pose, half lit a by that bare bulb, solemn, his one visible eye looking a little moist; he is not smiling at all. Patriotism, by what measure, and at what cost, this moment of his story invites us to ask?
What we are really noticing in these examples, it seems, is the photographer's capacity for expressing ambiguity-indeed, his insistence on doing so through photographic elements that might normally register as mere icons. In describing fiction writing, O'Connor took the concept of ambiguity a step further and labeled it "analogical vision, " which she defined as "the kind of vision that is able to see different levels of reality in one image or situation" ("Nature" 72). In photography like Spencer's, we approach the work by detecting what we can of the concrete-the man and his rooster, the man and his flag. The material, in other words, provides our passage into the work and the world the photograph represents. We may elect to begin and end with envisioning the literal drama, wondering what is about to happen, imagining what has already occurred, or we may go beyond that narrative and symbolize our reading of it. Has a castration occurred in the transfer of Jimmie's rooster? Some dangerous liaison? Has our African American patriot resigned himself to an existence of impermeability, noncommunication, sealed behind a glass, darkly?
Continued from page 2.
In some of Spencer's most powerful images-I would maintain many of his best-he demonstrates the capacity for analogy directly. In the hands of a lesser artist, the symbolism in these works would be too blatant to be palatable. For Spencer, however, it appears a natural extension of his drive to express, as he has said, "metaphors" of existence. "Gussie's Magnolia," perhaps his most famous image, provides a good example. The frame of the photograph is nearly filled with the bulk of a Gussie, a large and distinguished looking black woman standing in what appears to be the yard in front of her weather-worn wooden house. Her head is wrapped in a scarf, and she is dressed in a dark dress that causes her very nearly to dissolve into the heavily toned brown-black of the background. Balanced lightly in her left hand, however, is an unblemished, unopened, perfectly white magnolia flower. Gussie holds the flower delicately, as if it is a cup she is about to drink from. This photograph may be "read" as we have approached the others, but here, the image begs not so much for animation as it does articulation. The symbolism of the magnolia is obvious, but its placement in Gussie's work-roughened hand appears simultaneously ambiguous and analogous: What are her intentions for this prototypical symbol of white Southernness-to tend it or study it, to merely hold it or to pass it along? Like Cooter as the "Patriot," Gussie is intended as a type. She is not smiling; she is not sad, merely resolved. We cannot know what she will do with it, but she appears more comfortable than most viewers may feel, Southern ones anyway, about her ability to balance the symbolic weight ofthat undeniably lovely white blossom on the tips of her long, dark fingers.
Similar possibilities for multiple levels of meaning exist for interpreting such powerful new works as "Woman with Rose Bush" and "Isabel y Conejo," both from the Mexican series and destined to join "Gussie's Magnolia" as signature images for Spencer. Like the best of his work, initially they beg questions of literal narrative: Where is the woman going? Where has she been? Was Isabel's bunny a gift? A thing she captured in the wild? But they also clearly suggest that the literal is not the end of their meaning. They invite contemplation on a higher plane: Metaphorically, has the woman's journey uplifted or exhausted her? Does the single-branched rose bush suggest hope or futility? The woman's body language and expression in the line of her mouth-is it a smile?-reserve a clear answer. Likewise, what does young, sweet-faced Isabel's clasping of her bunny's neck tell us about her intentions for it? Such youth must suggest innocence-but the slight tilt of her head and quality of her half-smile, seen looming in soft-focus in the background, leaves us uncertain. Is her innocence trumped by the desperation of the wild-eyed bunny she clasps? The adult photographer, whose miniature reflection in the bunny's marble-black eye is the most compelling spot in the image once you notice it, seems to be wondering that himself as he clicks the shutter.
In his "Afterword" in Native Soil, Spencer says,
I think that I have been given a gift-a gift of vision. Not just the vision of photography. That is secondary to the vision that allows me to see every single life as fascinating. I honestly believe that a great novel could be written about every one of us. We all have wondrous tales written across our faces. Some are epic, some tragic, some hilarious, some elegiac, and, of course, some are spare, but I believe none would be uninteresting. (157-58)
For its expression of the artist's role and the photographer's view of images as renderings of humanity's stories, this is the quotation that sent me first to Flannery O'Gonnor in seeking a frame of reference for Spencer's art. In her well-known essay "The Nature and Aim of Fiction," O'Connor writes, "There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption"-and I believe we might as well just say to create art for public consumption-"unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. "She goes on to describe such a "gift" as "a considerable responsibility": "It is a mystery in itself, something gratuitous and wholly undeserved, something whose real uses will probably always be hidden from us" (81).
Ultimately, I do not want to insist on the essential Southernness of any of the qualities I have mentioned as characteristic of Jack Spencer's photography; indeed, he strenuously resists the label "Southern" photographer (Morris). But Jack Spencer's practicing of his "gift of vision" presents profound new opportunities to discuss traditional Southern themes and concerns-race, class, the persistence of history and the complications of memory-even as he demonstrates their transferability, if not their universality, by pursuing them beyond the geographic boundaries of the South. His style is intimately bound up with his belief that "Making a photograph ... is a very abstract thing. It comes from all kinds of conscious and unconscious places. The photographs just present themselves to me. They find me" (Bell 54). In comments like this, we see that Spencer seems to feel he is a medium through which certain of those "old verities and truths of the heart" Faulkner defined for us seek expression-"love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice." Spencer's works are powerful reminders of how the mechanical act of photography may capture the image, but it is the photographer, the artist, who shapes it in expressing "poetic content" (Morris). As Spencer incorporates some of the tropes of Southern culture, from depictions of poverty to angst over race, he rewrites their complexity in rich shapes, tones, and layers of new possibilities for meaning.
Jack Spencer
Born:
Kosciusko, Mississippi, 1951
Education:
Attended Louisiana Tech, Ruston, Louisiana
Exhibitions:
More than 100 major exhibitions across the United States since 1994, when he presented his first solo show at the Southside Gallery, Jackson, Mississippi.
Publications:
2003 Southern Accents
2003 In Celebration of Light (Honolulu Museum of Art)
2002 Southern Accents
2002 Art & Antiques
2000 Wall Street Journal
2000 ARTnews
1999 Native Soil (Louisiana State UP)-a monograph with 79 images
1999 Mother Jones
1999 Black & White Magazine
1998 American Way Magazine, American Airlines
1998 Oxford American Magazine
1996 The South by Its Photographers (Birmingham Museum of Art and UP of Mississippi)
Major Collections:
Berkeley Museum of Art, Berkeley, California
Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama
The Brookings Institute, Fairfax, Virginia
Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia
First Tennessee Bank, Lebanon, Tennessee
Goldman Sachs & Company, Memphis, Tennessee
Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, South Carolina
Houston Museum of Fine Art, Houston, Texas
Sir Elton John Photographic Collection
Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, Mississippi
Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia
Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, Louisiana
Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio
Pearl Corporation, Tokyo, Japan
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California
Tennessee State Museum, Nashville, Tennessee
NOTES
I wish to thank Jack Spencer for supplying and permitting the reproduction of his photographs for this essay. I wish also to thank Jean Brown, owner of the Lexington Art Gallery (www.lexingtonartgallery.com), for her encouragement and assistance in obtaining the images for reproduction.
1 A champion of the socially interested realism that emerged from impressionism in art during the mid-nineteenth century, poet and critic Charles Baudelaire was nevertheless among the earliest critics of the medium. Reviewing the French Salon of 1859, as the Pictorialists were gaming confidence and pressing the boundaries between photography and painting, Baudelaire warned against the Industrial Age's uncriticial "madness" (89) in conflating the mechanical act of picture-making with the humane and inspired processes of creating art: "[I]f photography is allowed to deputize for art in some of art's activities," he worried, "it will not be long before it has supplanted or corrupted art altogether." Surely, photography has its uses as "the handmaid of the arts and sciences, but their very humble handmaid, " he insisted: "Let photography quickly enrich the traveller's album and restore to his eyes the precision his memory may lack; let it adorn the library of the naturalist, magnify microscopic insects, even strengthen, with a few facts, the hypotheses of the astronomer; let it, in short, be the secretary and record-keeper of whomever needs absolute material accuracy for professional reasons" (88).
2 Contemporary Southern photographers with whom Spencer has the most in common stylistically include Sally Mann, Debbie Flemming Caffery, and Deborah Luster.
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