Photographic Affinities

Photographic Affinities
BOOK PROPOSAL
David Deitcher
260 West Broadway, #8B
New York, NY 10013
Telephone: 212. 226.8974
Fax: 212.219.3784
[email protected]
This work is not for distribution. All rights are reserved by David Deitcher.
Photographic Affinities looks at the life and work of a little-known
Canadian photographer, Alan B. Stone (1928-1992), but this book is not
a conventional monograph. I present Stone's work as a means of
exploring some of the ways in which I experience, use, and am affected
by photographs—his photographs, and also one taken by an unidentified
member of my family. Photographic Affinities advances the idea that one
knows one's past in part through pictures—through looking at and
identifying with photographs that relate indirectly to one's experience.
This project demonstrates that photographs bear vivid, albeit mute
testimony to absent subjects; and that it is precisely that absence which
enables photographs to become, in Susan Sontag's words,“inexhaustible
invitations to deduction, speculation and fantasy.”
As such, this book is not an argument for the canonical status of Stone's
work within the context of photo history, any more than it is an
argument for the importance to that history of vernacular photography.
Stone was neither an art photographer nor an amateur snap-shooter;
he was a talented, resourceful, working photographer who explored a
variety of photographic genres, one of which came to dominate the rest:
physique photography—often camp pictures of variously lithe or beefy
young men who posed for the camera flexing muscles, in next to nothing
(and sometimes nothing at all), indoors and out. As «exemplified by»
small-format magazines with titles like Physique Illustrated, Face and
Physique, Physique Pictorial and Tomorrow's Man, the golden age of
physique photography extended roughly from the mid-1950s through
the mid-60s. Inasmuch as that period predates the Stonewall uprising1
and the modern movement for gay and lesbian rights, and corresponds
with the postwar demonization of sexual “deviants,” it is noteworthy that
such magazines provided their principal consumers (closeted gay men)
with a dime-thin veneer of deniability stemming from their claims to
athleticism and/or art.
1Riots
at New York City's Stonewall Inn June 27-28, 1969 marked the beginning of the Gay Liberation Movement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots
I first encountered Stone's photographs during a visit to Montreal in July
2001, when my friend Robert Bordo suggested that I see a survey of his
pictures at a local community cultural center. In addition to beefcake,
Stone took skillful, black-and-white photographs of Montreal as it
appeared during the 1950s and 60s, when I was a child growing up
there. Coming upon Stone's pictures of the city's urban and suburban
parks (though not of the bastion of English-speaking privilege in which I
was raised), of downtown before steel and glass towers intruded on its
sturdy stock of limestone buildings, of Old Montreal, and the port,
induced a rush of memories concerning the city that I had left at15. A
troubled youth, I was in danger of failing 9th grade, and my parents-on
the verge of divorce—sent me to boarding school in rural New
Hampshire.Those memories have a richness and complexity that reflect
their deep roots in the psychosexual history of my childhood, of family,
and culture as my family narrowly defined it. Photography was not art.
It was the stuff of souvenirs. Paintings, drawings and sculpture were art;
classical music was art.
One particular picture generated an especially strong shock of
recognition and opened the way for me to connect, not so much with
what Stone depicted as what Stone's pictures represented for me.The
photograph in question—a daytime shot of a newsstand—is in many
ways unremarkable, and yet its effect on me remains deep. On
December 12, 1951 (I would have been almost 3), Stone (then 24) shot
18 pictures of newsstands in and around the center of the city. Unlike
modernist masters such as Walker Evans who, in shooting similar
subjects, zoomed in on the visual cacophony of the printed pages on
display, Stone pictured the dilapidated sidewalk news huts from a
discrete distance, as if also to survey the customers and the passersby,
and their long, crisp shadows, cast coldly by the low, raking, winter sun.
Nobody knows for certain why Stone engaged in this, his sole foray into
typological photography, but his interest in newsstands may well have
related to the business he would open 2 years later. The Mark One
Studio trafficked in physique photography, selling bundles of beefcake
discretely through the post office boxes that Stone maintained,
anonymously of course, just south of the Quebec-New York State line;
and publishing such images in magazines he published: among them,
Physique Illustrated, Face and Physique, Crew and Ahoy, which he
distributed throughout the period at newsstands such as those he had
only just pictured.
As a closeted gay adolescent growing up in a conservative Jewish family,
newsstands became objects of obsessive fascination, in part because
they represented a kind of culture that rarely penetrated the walls of my
family's home; but also—indeed principally—because of the little
magazines I lusted after, some of which Stone had published. I therefore
identify with Stone's distanced point of view. I read it as cautious—
indicative of a probably fearful desire to remain unnoticed. Perhaps even
more than the fact that I can appreciate Stone's taste for, and way of
picturing, beautiful men, I connect with Stone's photographic point of
view, which bridges the gap between his life and mine. Although I never
met Stone, I feel as if our paths crossed—this, despite differences in age,
class and culture.
Stone's point of view is therefore central to this project, and extends
well beyond the newsstand pictures to encompass many of his
studies of Montreal during the years of my childhood and early
adolescence there. It is unmistakable in pictures he took of the old
port, in which Stone captured longshoremen and merchant seamen
at work in the bright light of day, even as he stood in the darkness of
shed interiors in order to shoot them from afar. It is present in the
series of nighttime pictures he shot of the first Steinberg's—that is,
the first to open of Montreal's première (in every sense) postwar
supermarkets. Stone's point of view is poignantly present in a picture
he took looking down a nondescript city street during what looks like
dusk.
Dominating the right hand third of this picture is the low-slung steel
skeleton of a two-story building under construction. Elegant though
that linear structure is in its stark contrast to the solid stone mass of
the building on the left, this formal correspondence does not move
me. It corresponds with what Roland Barthes referred to as the
studium of the picture—its general, declarative contents. What does
move me—what pricks my soul (here, Barthes's punctum)—is the
discrete presence of two men in overcoats and fedoras in close
conversation under a lamppost in the shadow of the stone building
that occupies the left third of the photograph. The men stand at a
considerable distance from Stone, who must have had to crouch,
leaning his shoulder into the building for support in order to hold his
view camera inches above the sidewalk so as not to disturb the two
men. Looking at this picture, I see myself stealing glances at the little
magazine covers that the newsstand vendors displayed in the hopes
of attracting the attention of closeted gay men—and adolescents like
me.
Stone's discrete point of view also suggests surveillance, pictures
taken on the sly, as if collecting evidence of an unidentified crime.
Stone identified the nature of that criminality in 195«tktk» when he
took a picture of a sign posted on the trunk of a tree in a public park
that bordered the Lachine Canal. Opened in 1825, the Lachine Canal
was Montreal's sole shipping artery prior to the opening the St.
Lawrence Seaway in 1959. Stone frequently took his camera to the
area around the canal to shoot studies of its system of locks, of the
cargo ships that passed slowly through the canal on their way to and
from the Great Lakes; and to picture the men and boys who
congregated there as well—this, at the last possible moment before
the Canal became obsolete. In French and English, the sign in the park
reads: “PERSONS OF GOOD EDUCATION AND MORALS ARE
INVITED TO THIS PARK.” As the presence of this message plainly
demonstrates, it would have taken courage, and considerable drive,
to run a business like Mark One in that city during the 1950s and 60s.
(Given that Stone ran Mark One out of the basement of the modest,
split-level suburban home that he shared with his mother until his
death in 1992, it is oddly appropriate to consider that Stone—a
proper anglophile—was not so much in the closet as he was in the
basement.)
Historians refer to this postwar period in Quebec as les années noirs (the dark years),
for the dismal economic and political circumstances of French Canadians, and the
cultural paralysis that also came as part of the cost of the seemingly interminable
administration of the autocratic, corrupt Premier, Maurice Duplessis (1936-39, 194459).Then there was the deeply homophobic, crime-fighting Mayor Jean Drapeau, who
ushered Montreal into the height of its mid-century modernist moment of
international glory with Expo 67.Throughout that period, and well into the 1960s, the
Drapeau's morality squads regularly raided commercial establishments where gay
men gathered—especially when events like Expo loomed on the rosy horizon. The
police rounded up suspected homosexuals in raids that made sensational headlines in
local tabloids. With an added touch of homophobic malice, which typifies postwar
anti-queer bigotry, journalists saw fit to name the accused in print—sometimes with
lethal consequences. When it did not lead to violent arrest, exposure as homosexual
then meant disgrace, personal ruin, and sometimes suicide. Homosexual acts
remained illegal in Quebec, as they were throughout the rest of Canada, until Prime
Minister Pierre-Elliot Trudeau passed the Omnibus Bill of 1969, which stated that there
is no room for the government in the bedrooms of consenting adults.
1946 The (Montreal) Gazette, Source : ANC, FC-53641, The Gazette Collection : Société d'histoire d'Asbestos
Photographer: Unknown. At the centre of the image Maurice Duplessis holds his hat, standing next to Mgr Joseph
Charbonneau, and the police at Saint-Thérèse in a meeting of goodwill with the clergy.
Adding poignancy to Stone's enterprise is the fact that he—a
closeted devotee of youthful male beauty and strength—was himself
a bent over, stocky man who depended on canes and the assistance
of friends to get around—this, as a result of having been stricken with
a virulent form of arthritis by the time he was barely twenty.
During the 1960s, Stone convinced friends (among others, models
who became his friends) to take the wheel of his beloved camper
and escort him on road trips to picturesque destinations in western
Canada. In British Columbia, for example, Stone shot unforgettable
pictures of a small, regional rodeo—further proof of his appreciation
for archetypal embodiments of rugged masculinity. One such
model/companion/chauffeur, Billy Hill, was involved in a brush with
the law that also threatened Stone and his business.
In 1961,following a three-week investigation by Lieutenant Jacques
Saulnier of the Montreal Morality Squad, the police raided the Caruso
Physical Culture Studio—a gym and photo studio run by Jimmy Caruso.
Caruso, who had also used Billy Hill as one of his models, was charged
with possessing “obscene photographs of males,” and conspiring with
other, unnamed persons, to distribute them nationally and internationally.
The police seized 6,000 photographs including bundles of photos packed
and ready for shipment, as well as Caruso's mailing lists. The police also
secured a warrant to search Stone's suburban home in Pointe Claire
where they found nothing incriminating enough to bring charges. The
experience was, to put it mildly, a sobering one. The exposure of
Caruso's customers had a chilling effect on Stone's business, leading him
to state in an interview that his business went “down-the-tubes.”
In 1951, before Stone photographed the newsstands of Montreal, he
enrolled in a number of courses at the New York School of Modern
Photography—one of a number of now forgotten commercial
establishments that touted “exciting new careers in photography” for
men who could pay for their technical education with funds from the G.I.
Bill. Not long before his death, in an interview with queer historians Ross
Higgins and Thomas Waugh, Stone insisted that he wasn't an artist, but
was in photography for the money. Doutbless, this attitude was consitent
with the New York School of Modern Photography's mercantile approach.
But Stone did not learn photography itself at that school. He first learned
to take pictures as a boy scout at summer camp, and earned for himself
a photography badge, after which he shared his skill in, and enthusiasm
for, taking pictures with his family. The Boy Scouts of Canada also
recognized Stone's talent.
From the late 1940s, well into the 50s, the Scouts commissioned him to
shoot pictures that ranged from conventional head shots of cub scouts
to sequential action shots of adolescents swimming, diving,
demonstrating water safety and lifesaving techniques. Similary, Stone
photographed the World Boy Scout Jamborees at such quintessentially
Canadian locales as Niagara-on-the-Lake, in Ontario, and the
Tamaracouta Scout Reserve on Lake Tamaracouta in Quebec's Laurentian
Mountains. In 1958, having run Mark One for five years, and having gained
a degree of professionalism in proportion to a loss of innocence, Stone
traveled to Camp Samac, on the bucolic shores of that eponymous lake
in Oshawa, Ontario. There, Stone took some of his most subtly erotic
and formally stunning pictures of youths, once again camping, swimming,
diving, demonstrating water safety and life-saving techniques, some of
which—ostensibly practical pictures—nonetheless provided Stone with
occasions to photograph handsome youths rescuing each other in
“period” Speedos.
When I look at his picture of boys on a swimming dock diving into a lake,
I think of a prosaic picture that an unidentified member of my family took
of “general swim” on the “boys' side” of Camp Modin in north-central
Maine where my siblings and I spent many summers, as our dad had
before us. Far from being a scout camp, Modin was a Jewish, indeed
kosher, summer camp. Looking at Stone's picture of a scout painting a
rowboat, I smell the painted wood of boats, the painted skin of old
canoes, and feel the gunnels under my hands. Looking at Stone's pictures
of scouts in summertime stirs up powerful feelings about camp as the
crucible in which my queer erotic longings were forged, one result of
which is an endlessly fascinating repertoire of sexual fantasies that
remains with me to this day.
Photographer Unknown
Camp Modin, Canaan, Maine
early 1950s
Waves of longing accompany such a close examination of these
photographs, just as they do in the case of Stone's other photographs of
Montreal, its environs and of the Canadian wilderness.The word for this
kind of sweet sadness is, of course, nostalgia. The Merrian Webster
Dictionary traces nostalgia to the New Latin and Greek nostos, or return
home, and to the Greek neisthai, to return; and to the Old English
genesan, to survive. It defines nostalgia as:
1) the state of being homesick.
2) a wistful or “excessively sentimental yearning for
return to some past period or irrecoverable
condition.”
While it is not my intention to attempt a full scale rehabilitation of
nostalgia, neither, at this stage in my life, will I conceal the fact that looking
at such pictures does more than evoke memories of past times and
places; it induces a state of longing for a sense of resigned connection to
what, and whom, are past. But the roots of this sensation extend beyond
the details of either my personal life, or Stone's photographs, or the
meanings of nostalgia, to photography itself.
Consider Stone's stunning picture of a beautiful boy in the pellucid
waters of Lake Samac with a diver's mask positioned on his forehead,
hands raised to lower it over his eyes. Once I get accustomed to the
elegant geometry of the composition itself (arms raised to echo in
reverse the mask's soft triangle), I can't help but wonder about the fate
of that beautiful boy. What became of him? What would he look like a
half-century later? Is he still alive? In this context I remember Sontag's
assertion that photographs “state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives
heading toward their own destruction, and this link between
photography and death haunts all photographs of people.”
Adding immeasurably to this morbid effect is the indexical nature of the
photograph; the fact that, as Barthes wrote, the photograph “is literally
an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there,
proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here.”
Photographic presence, if one can call it that, results from the
contradictory coexistence of the vividness with which photographs
represent their subject, and the jarring sense that, even as the shutter
falls, the subject is in every meaningful sense gone. Barthes famously
named this paradoxical structure “that-has-been,” which he identified,
moreover, as the “noeme”—the fundamental reality—of the photograph.
That absence at the heart of every photograph inspired photo historian
Gregory Batchen to identify the over-the-top embellishment of
photographs in the late 19th and early 20th century as a strategy for
overcoming the sense of absence, loss, and lack, in pictures of people. I
prefer, however, to think of that absence in terms of an affective physics.
The generative effect of the absence at the heart of photographs recalls
literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov's theory of narrative structure. Using
Henry James's “The Figure in the Carpet” as his example, Todorov
proposed that the motor principle behind narrative is an absence (of
narrative information) at its center. Once that absence is filled (and in
James's modernist short story, it never is), narrative ceases. The
combination of photography's muteness—the fact that photographs
cannot say what they let us see—with the present absence of whatever,
or whomever, it pictures creates a vacuum that the viewer's deduction,
speculation, fantasy and, above all, emotion rush in to fill. Photographic
Affinities provides a case study in that process.
All pictures by Alan B. Stone appear courtesy of the Archives gaies du
Québec, the official repository for Stone's negatives and related materials,
which holds the copyright on his photographs. A few years before
Stone's death, Montreal scholar Thomas Waugh (professor, department
of cinema, Concordia University, Montreal) identified Stone as the
owner/operator of Mark One Studio, and, with Ross Higgins (historian
and founding member of the Archives gaies du Québec), located and met
with Stone to discuss his work. After Stone's death in 1992, surviving
family members agreed to donate his negatives and related materials to
the Archives gaies du Québec. My thanks to the Archives—to Tom
Waugh, Louis Godbout, Ross Higgins, Iain Blair, Marcel Raymond and
others—for their continued support of this project.