string theories: annegret soltau’s
transitional, fetishistic photocollages
AFTERIMAGE 36.4 FEATURE
Throughout four decades of experimentation with photography, the
German artist Annegret Soltau has defied the typical experience of a
photograph—as an individual, pure, paper rectangle with an illusionistic
window. Her early endeavors
were invigorated through
gridded
repetitions
of
prints and her mature
work is energized by what
appears at first as the violent
tearing
and
monstrous
suturing of mismatched
and fragmented bodies
presented in photographic
collages. However, these
difficult images are more
accurately viewed as fetishes
that mitigate an early
traumatic loss in Soltau’s
life and reassure her familial
connections.
6
Written contemporaneously
with Soltau’s creation of her
first stitched pieces in the
early 1980s, Christian Metz’s
“Photography and Fetish”1
presents important insights
for
understanding
why
conventional photography
is laden with thanatos. This
essay is called upon to offer
insight into Soltau’s fetishistic
reassertion of time, tactility,
and the fullness of space into
the photographic medium.
Certainly, Sigmund Freud’s
notion of the fetish comes
into play in Metz’s argument,
and in this essay’s rhetoric. In
addition, I will discuss D.W.
Winnicott’s
“transitional
objects” as fetishes in their
own right and especially as his concept applies to the stitched strings that
permeate Soltau’s photographic output.
In his numerous comparisons between cinema and photography, Metz
calls the photograph “a silent rectangle of paper.”2 While this reading
is both socialized and pervasive, the history of photography shows
significant counterexamples including very physical daguerreotypes,
ambrotypes and tintypes, stereographs—Disdéri’s multi-image cartes,
Eadweard Muybridge’s sequences, Bauhaus experimentation, and Ray
Metzker’s mid-1960s work, “Composites.” In addition to examples from
photographic technology and art, Geoffrey Batchen offers many instances
from vernacular photography that counter the “silent rectangle” notion.3
Indeed, even while Metz was writing his essay in the early 1980s, many
contemporaries
including
the Starn twins, David
Hockney, Andy Warhol, and
the focus of this text, Soltau,
were making photographic
amalgams
that
offered
expressive alternatives to
the “silent rectangles of
paper” encountered both
in modernist “straight”
photography and quotidian
photo
lab
prints.
In
freely reinterpreting the
photograph, these artists
added the “movement and
plurality of images” and the
temporal that Metz ascribed
to cinema.4
One of the fundamental
differences
between
photography and cinema is
the way each of these media
expresses the “in-frame” and
“off-frame” dualism. Metz
posited that although “the
photograph
[comprises]
the ‘in-frame’ . . . the place
of presence and fullness,”
it is inevitably “haunted
and undermined by the
feeling of its exterior,” of
its “off-frame”—that void
just beyond the image.5
This notion holds true in
the common understanding
of the photograph as an
illusionistic “silent rectangle.”
However, many artists use
overt formal, sociological, semiotic, and historic strategies to fill the offframe’s emptiness in pieces that attempt to transcend the convention.
Above
Vatersuche XXVIII (recto) (2005) (sewn photograph); © 2008 Annegret
Soltau, VG-Bildkunst, Bonn/Germany
Facing page
transgenerativ—MutterTochterVaterSohn 59 (verso) (2005) (sewn
photograph); © 2008 Annegret Soltau, VG-Bildkunst, Bonn/Germany
The long list of those making experimental applications of photographic
images includes luminaries such as Vito Acconci, Eleanor Antin, John
Baldessari, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Anna and Bernhard Blume, Christian
Boltanski, Gilbert and George, and Duane Michaels. While these artists
arguably transcend the single image’s frame to create aggregates about
identity, community, sociology, narrative, and reflexive critiques of
photography itself, most of their works remain “silent rectangles of
paper” collected and frequently arranged in grids.
This is all to say that Soltau (born in 1946) and some of her
contemporaries have created the most radical photographic works
with collaged images, fractured photographic space, torn “impure”
prints, and stitching in order to challenge this limited understanding
of the photographic endeavor. There are notable precedents and
contemporaries who, like Soltau, stitch their photographs. Bea
Nettles was among the first in 1969; Betty Hahn and Keith Smith
followed in their photographic and book arts endeavors in the 1970s,
and even Andy Warhol made approximately five hundred “Stitched
Photographs” in the 1980s.6
As the accompanying illustrations make plain, Soltau engages similar
formal problems in photography as she uses repeated images, collage,
AFTERIMAGE 36.4 FEATURE
Countless other practitioners, including occult photographers, Anton
Giulio Bragaglia, Harry Callahan, André Kertesz, Étienne-Jules Marey,
László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, and Jerry Uelsmann experimented
with multiple exposures and re-photography that (though still framed
by the single piece of paper) clearly broke through the convention of
the singular illusionistic image.
Soltau learned from two photographic pioneers: Kurt Kranz and David
Hockney at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg (where she
studied from 1967–72). Kranz’s experiments with photography date
to his studies at the Bauhaus Dessau when he made groundbreaking
amalgamations such as Münder-Reihe (Schwitters) (1930–31) and Augen
Reihe (1930–31), which are comprised of several photographic prints
organized in a grid. Kranz’s photographic framing of distinctive body
parts in these grids, along with collaged clippings of bodies in works
such as Clear-Cut Distinction (1930), anticipate Soltau’s visual strategy and
use of human forms. Even before making his well-known photographic
collages, Hockney studied photography’s relationship to painting. (This
interest culminated in his 2001 book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost
Techniques of the Old Masters.7) Beginning in 1982, and contemporaneous
to Soltau’s early composites, Hockney created photocollages, first of
massed Polaroids, and later of color prints as in Mother I, Yorkshire Moors,
August 1985 #1 (1985). Such works show an ostensibly singular subject
comprised of the prints, but each photographic framing reveals a slightly
different perspective—and time’s passage is connoted through changes
of position. The illusionistic compartments that make a fractured
whole owe a debt to cubism especially as different perspectives reveal
the simultaneity (multiple points of view represented in one painting)
so important to cubist investigations of space.8 This photographic
splintering is obviously shared, and even anticipated by Soltau.
7
AFTERIMAGE 36.4 FEATURE
interrupted photographic space, and torn “impure” prints. Soltau is
among the innovative sewers of photographic prints.
8
Pieces such as Selbst 10 (1975), in which Soltau embroiders patterns
that embellish the silver-gelatin print, show her earliest juxtapositions
of photography and thread. Through their layers and stitches, Soltau’s
works rewrite the singular, illusionistic photograph. She creates patterns
that complicate the “immobility and silence” that Metz ascribed to
photography9 and defies monocular perspective, mimetic “truth,” and
even the frame itself.
Her composites make manifest Metz’s assertion that “Movement and
plurality both imply time.”10 Certainly early arrangements such as
Schwanger (1980–82) seem cinematic, with slightly different images in
each frame, they look like enlarged filmstrips, but her collages from the
last two decades involve other references to time—cubist simultaneity
and familial generations.11
Negating the photograph’s stillness through cubistic interventions,
Soltau reintroduces time to attain the “semblance of life” that Metz
ascribes to cinema.12 While Soltau’s stitched collages are not geometric
reductions, their spatial fracturing remains distinctively cubist. Works
such as those in the “transgenerativ” series present framings of whole,
though shattered, bodies (much like the recognizable massings of figures
in cubist portraits). Soltau mixes in close-ups, fragments with visibly
different modeling and color balance, value inversions, and color and
black-and-white prints. However, through the stitched, layered forms,
Soltau also asserts the photographic referent’s “in-frame” content. The
formal manipulations defer the visual exterior of each fragment to
yet another in-frame and in doing so create ambiguities between each
photographic fragment and the larger collective image. The stitched
works offer a dualism of individual image(s) and united compositions of
the human form. The viewer perceives the whole or individual parts in
a rival-schemata ambiguity like Joseph Jastrow’s rabbit/duck illusion.13
Continuing the investigation of time in Soltau’s endeavors, a
wonderfully appropriate statement by Metz applies: “Photography is
the mirror, more faithful than any actual mirror, in which we witness at
every age, our own aging.”14 Soltau marks generational age differences
Above
transgenerativ—MutterTochterVaterSohn 59 (recto) (2005) (sewn
photograph); © 2008 Annegret Soltau, VG-Bildkunst, Bonn/Germany
in her “generativ” series and shows the interconnected relationships
of people and parts of bodies. She creates an allegory of the stages of
human life—she is at once granddaughter, daughter, self, and mother.
Soltau’s Selbst-Geburt (1996) similarly suggests the reassertion of the self
in a parthenogenetic death-negating fantasy.
To be sure, Soltau’s unorthodox use of photography is nearly all deathnegating—set in high relief when considering the many recent fatal
readings of photography. The most famous of these analyses comes
from Roland Barthes who in Camera Lucida (1981), calls the photographic
moment cut from reality the “that-has-been” (ça a éte) and the photograph
itself “an image which produces death while trying to preserve life.”15
The French media critic Philippe Dubois expands this idea of the frozen
photographic subject and moment by calling the photographed person
“dead for having been seen” (Mort pour avoir éte vu).16 Comparing the
medium to a corpse, Metz argues that photography’s “immobility and
silence are not only two objective aspects of death, they are its main
symbols, they figure it.”17 Other well-known equations of photography
and death include Susan Sontag’s study of “Melancholy Objects”18 of
mortality and transience and Peter Wollen’s statement that “Photographs
appear as devices for stopping time and preserving fragments of the past,
like flies in amber.”19
In contrast to these analyses, Soltau’s reassertions of the self in and
through loved ones mitigates any sense of loss (whether an actual death,
remembering a person as they were, or the loss of the moment (even if
photographed) vanished forever. Recognizing the presence of the mother
or grandmother in one’s own body, these relatives are never truly gone.
The self is regenerated in depictions with Soltau’s own children that
attempt to thwart both death and thanatography.
Indeed, Soltau emphasizes the relationship between motherhood and
photography. “Like a photograph, the child is always connected to its
referent: its mother,” writes photography scholar (and mother) Carol
Mavor. “A photograph carries its referent with it, just as a mother
carries her child with her body, even after birth.”20 And further in this
direction citing the psychoanalyst and philosopher Julia Kristeva: “What
connection is there between myself, or even more unassumingly between
my body and this internal graft and fold, which, once the umbilical cord
has been severed, is an inaccessible other?21 Mavor and Kristeva posit that
the child once born has gone “missing.” The mother feels the umbilical
cord’s cut with an anxiety not unlike the child’s later initial physical and
psychological disengagement, detachment, and dis-identification from
the mother.
If Soltau’s torn, fractured images suggest familial continuity, her threads
assure us that the object we observe is part of our lived existence and
not merely some illusionistic parallel. They remind us not only of the
cords she wrapped around people in her early 1970s performances, but
that performance art itself is a robust, lived expression especially when
compared to documentation’s mere trace. The art critic Donald Kuspit
explains these materials’ psychoanalytic significance: “[O]bjects that
wrap or constrain—apotheosize skin-closeness with the mother, absolute
bonding with or bondage to the . . . mother.”23 Soltau’s hand-sewn black
threads have varied thicknesses and tensions; sometimes with doubled or
even tripled stitches. Regular on the print’s image side, on the verso the
recurring stitches may extend to mark new seams; the threads terminate
in tied-off knots and dangling ends. The strings effectively destroy the
framing—not necessarily the four edges defining the photographic
image, but the illusionistic plane’s parergon, what Jacques Derrida calls
the “sans of the pure cut” described as an “invisibility [that] marks a full
totality to which it does not belong.”24 The photographic parergon is the
“off-frame,” the life from which the referent is cut.
The haptic thread disavows the robustness of the photographic illusion.
As the threads puncture the print’s sacred surface, Soltau makes the
viewer sure he or she looks at a physical presence and in doing so
reattaches these photographs to a living, temporal, spatial, haptic reality.
Her pieces often are presented in exhibitions and catalogs with front
and back visible. The thread is asserted as fastening device, sculptural
presence (in conjunction with torn paper), and as lines “drawn” on the
prints’ verso. The stitched threads run as a narrative of disappearance
and reemergence—an abiding game of “fort-da” (elaborated upon
below) with presences and absences on both sides.
In emphasizing this physicality, especially as the sewing causes the prints
to further tear and buckle, Metz’s “off-frame” becomes photography’s
matter itself. Confronting the viewer with the medium’s facticity, Soltau
paradoxically mitigates the importance of in-frame illusion(s) even as she
constructs her works from them.
The use of thread and the domestic sewing act both challenge the
masculinity of photography’s distanced, objectifying paradigm. Like the
artists in the 1970s feminist art movements, Soltau uses once-debased
material and domestic practices to challenge conventional photographic
presentation. Such evocations of the feminine and essential are not to
say that Soltau’s art lies solely within feminist ideologies and narratives
(even though she is best known to American audiences by her inclusion
in the “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution” traveling exhibition of
2007–09).25 As a woman, daughter, and mother, Soltau brings a feminine
sensibility, but her art speaks to broader experiences: connectedness and
loss, identity and fracturing.
Soltau’s stitches puncture the sacred surface of the photographic prints,
ecstatically and repeatedly destroying the illusionistic plane. Opposed
AFTERIMAGE 36.4 FEATURE
Soltau attempts to recapture body parts in generational works such as
generativ 79 (1998) by making them hers again. That is, she regains the
bodies that she has birthed; she recovers her own past body lost in the
aging process. By dealing with family members in her constructions,
Soltau creates sociologically complex art; both souvenirs of loved ones
and professional products. She produces a tension through the public
display of nude family members—loved ones objectified by the camera in
their nakedness, even as their recompositions bespeak intimate concerns.
If these pieces seem violent, they convey less a brutality of hacked bodies,
and more a confrontation with photography’s inherent thanatos. She
breaks the stillness and silence that photographs share with the corpse.
The haptic torn edges and threads suggest a maternal, domestic touch.
Soltau says of these remnants: “When I tear out the face of my portrait,
it is not the aspect of destruction which interests me, but I want to find
new meanings and significant connections.”22 The continuity of bodies
again adds the dimension of time and also indicates a lineage, a place,
the essence of family portraiture, and a reminder as to why we keep
family albums.
9
to invisibly mounting them under mats, Soltau chooses to make obvious
and physical the means by which she situates, juxtaposes, and holds
together these photographic prints. Mavor emphasizes the sense of
touch perceptible in works by Julia Margaret Cameron and Clementina
Hawarden among others and offers a complementary model to the
arguably masculine “visual.” In Mavor’s three books, Pleasures Taken
(1995), Becoming (1999), and Reading Boyishly (2007), she emphasizes
the textures of depicted objects; hair and cloth’s sensuality; touching
among family members, caresses between mothers and children;
and even the photographs’ materiality.26 These studies inform the
phenomenon of scrapbook making whereby (mostly) women compile
personal memorials to their own lives and those of loved ones. More
than just collections of photographs, scrapbooks (or similarly adorned
photo albums) include fabric swatches, tickets, pressed flowers, and
newspaper clippings in their often-elaborate compositions.27 Deckled
cuts, rivets, and otherwise physical mounting embellish these objects. In
this domestic and gendered activity, the haptic holds sway.
AFTERIMAGE 36.4 FEATURE
Soltau’s framings and threads similarly add a haptic feminine eroticism
that displaces the male objective fetish—the cut photographic object. 28
Central to Metz’s “Photography and Fetish” is his assertion that the
photograph is a fetish because it is often regarded as a substitute for an
irrecoverable reality. It is a cut from existence. Soltau’s stitches present
a palpable fetish in their own right since they compromise the cut as the
strings attempt to reunite the photograph with the fullness of existence,
living, and the erotic; she manifests a fantasy of reattaching the mother
to the child.
10
Winnicott offers a reading that desexualizes (but certainly doesn’t deeroticize) fetishized strings in his concept of the transitional object. In
sum, transitional objects are usually those haptic items to which infants
and children seem attached. Plush animals, soft cloths, even toy cars
soothe the child who after birth becomes increasingly independent
from the mother; these articles become reassuring substitutes for
the nourishing breast and maternal closeness as the child begins to
negotiate its autonomy. In “Transitional Objects and Transitional
Phenomena” Winnicott applies his theories to an anonymous elevenyear-old boy who’s fixated on strings and tying together domestic items.
Winnicott interprets these strings as late transitional objects that are
attempts to deny separation from his mother. Because the boy’s mother
was depressed, detached and often hospitalized in his early years,
Winnicott observed that his patient did not make a successful early
transition.29 Another famous transitional string in the psychoanalytic
literature is attached to a spool made a plaything by Sigmund Freud’s
grandson, Ernst.30 In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) Freud observes
Ernst’s play—tossing the spool out of sight and over a curtain, Ernst
emits a sad “fort,” meaning “gone.” A tug on the string brings back the
spool and Ernst delights in saying “da!” for “here.” Freud posits that
Ernst developed this game in order to come to terms with his mother’s
everyday departures.31
Soltau’s photographic works introduce other fort/da, and related
rabbit/duck, conundrums. Tearing and stitching the photographs may
interrupt our seeing the photographic referents, nevertheless these
images stubbornly remain even as Soltau makes photographic signifiers
(contrasting papers, layers of emulsions, etc.) quite obvious. Her work
turns on these bistable (rabbit/duck) rivals of signifier and referent, and
our space versus the photographed space. In Camera Lucida’s opening
chapters, Barthes points out the obstinate primacy of the image,
calling it a “singular adherence” that makes it difficult “to ‘see’ the
photographic signifier.”32 But in discussing photography’s ontological
puzzle he also discusses the powerful presence the viewer invests in the
referent. Soltau’s rival-schemata ambiguities are fort/da games in their
own right. “Da!” we see the in-frame presences of Soltau’s loved ones;
“Fort!” awareness of the off-framing paper, emulsion, and threads (and
the backs of the photos) make the family disappear.
Fetishes (or transitional objects) are not limited to Soltau’s photos and
threads. Kuspit asserts that
the fragmentation that is central to Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism
and Expressionism has been deployed in different ways in this
century to divide and conquer the body. Each of these seminal
Modernist styles is an apotheosis of destruction and idealization:
dismemberment itself, we might say, through the ever-shifting
balance between bodily substance and body shapes in the work,
becomes a fetishistic ritual. . . . The aura of losing control, or of
incomplete control—as in compositions that don’t quite congeal,
that retain a rawness, that seem arbitrary assemblages about to
fall apart, that suffer from body image problems—is crucial to the
work of the contemporary fetishmakers . . .33
These ideas follow from Melanie Klein’s theorizations of infantile
impulses that fantasize destruction of the mother’s body. Apropos to
Soltau’s dismembering and stitching, Klein pairs children’s desires
for reparation along with destructive drives. In “Early Stages of
the Oedipus Conflict” Klein theorizes that a girl’s sadistic feelings
toward her mother are brought about by deprivation of the mother’s
nourishing breast and rivalries for father’s affections. Klein also
theorizes that a girl will want to restore her mother’s body out of a
sense of “anticipation of motherhood,” an anxiety that retribution
for her sadism will take the form of destruction to her own body and
procreative powers, and fear that if the mother is destroyed, the girl will
be left all alone.34 In another paper, Klein summarizes the relationships
of these destructive/restorative desires to artmaking: “when the
representation of destructive wishes is succeeded by an expression of
reactive tendencies, we constantly find that drawing and painting are
used as means to restore people.”35
Applied to Soltau’s art, the above psychoanalytic theorizations suggest
that her fracturing of (already fetishistic) photographs into tears and
layers, and her stitching of (already fetishistic) thread lead to an overall
fetishistic practice that repeatedly detaches in order to avow assuring
familial connections.36 Soltau directly engages the fetish’s Freudian
iconography in her “transgenerativ” arrangements that recombine
masculine and feminine forms among immediate family members: her
husband, son, daughter, and herself. The fetish hypothesized by Freud
replaces the phallus that the small boy expects to find on his mother.
The fetish object theoretically mitigates the boy’s anxiety in discovering
the vulvic gash and fear of his own castration. Soltau’s constructions
such as transgenerativ—MutterTochterVaterSohn, 59 (2005) illustrate these
psychoanalytic fantasies, including phallic females and castrated males
who play out in the domestic sphere. The power of these pieces,
however, are not that they illustrate Freudian premises, but that they
transcend such legible iconography to point to the
complex relationships that psychoanalysts might
call “familial romance.” If later analysts and
therapists see his theories, such as the castration
complex, as metaphorical, it is partly because
Freud discusses these anxieties in the context of
infants forming primary relationships and their
own identities. Soltau’s familial transgendered
works maintain the erotic (though not perverse)
connections among family members through the
recognition of her body, and that of her husband
in the female and male offspring alike.
Soltau’s “Vatersuche” series allows some
insights as to why the assertion of these familial
connections is so important to her. In this series,
she attempts to apply the logic of her torn images
to connect to her father who went missing in
World War II’s ravages. The maps and letters from
government bureaus and veteran’s organizations
that bespeak her father’s “unknown fate” prove
poor substitutes for the photographic fragments
of family members that Soltau usually employs.
One sorely misses the richness of photographic
image-referents, even with their limitations and
deathly connotations. Our gestalt sensibilities
cannot transcend the visual gaps left in their
place. Obviously, these are the lacunae in Soltau’s
identity; the letters are responses, not answers, to
her inquiries about her father’s fate, and they are
poor substitutes toward this self-construction.
One work, Vatersuche XXVIII (2005), contains an
aged, small black-and-white photograph of a
soldier on a footbridge.37 Here the photograph
operates as pure fetish—a substitute for the
desired missing person who gave form and life
to the artist but whom Soltau has never known.
The “Vatersuche” series offers the viewer an
impetus for Soltau’s endeavors that connect her
to family members—lacking this primary bond
and the identity it brings, the artist has asserted
her identity through other familial relationships.38
Above
Vatersuche XXVIII (verso) (2005) (sewn photograph); © 2008 Annegret
Soltau, VG-Bildkunst, Bonn/Germany
Following page
generativ 79 (verso) (1998) (sewn photograph); © 2008 Annegret Soltau,
VG-Bildkunst, Bonn/Germany
But for all the shredding and suturing and wars and loss it is fitting
to describe Soltau’s work as an antidote to, rather than a depiction
of, violence. Barthes posits, “The photograph is violent: not because it
shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by
force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed.”39 This
reasoning suggests another motivation for Soltau’s addition of physical
fetishes to the visual. Through the assertion of physicality she refuses
photography’s symbolic order and if she is unable to exactly transform
it, she at least interrupts the force of the in-frame referent. Though the
AFTERIMAGE 36.4 FEATURE
In another series grounded in historic tragedy, actual and implied
physicality give power to Soltau’s “NY.FACES” (1985). Through haptic
symbolism and nearly intolerable imagery, she emphasizes the extreme
physical discomfort of oral surgery, of felt pain and the suture (thread)
that punctures in order to heal. NY.FACES—chirugische Operationen XX
(2002) shows the needle’s excruciating prick before its anesthetic takes
effect. This series reflects the unbearability of looking at contemporary
tragedies, the impact of which, even if experienced at a distance,
results in palpable manifestation—in felt anxiety, pain, and depression.
The open and fractured mouths become hyperbolic screams. These
works, too, bespeak traumatic loss, the anxiety of infantile separation
reiterated in tragedies such as the events of 9/11.
11
12
AFTERIMAGE 36.4 FEATURE
AFTERIMAGE 36.4 FEATURE
13
threads and tears are still an inadequate replacement for the fullness
of life itself, she complicates the singularity of the “silent rectangle.”
In attempting to bridge this gap her transitional interruptions (physical
and otherwise) become fetishes trying to make up for the photograph’s
deficiencies as a fetish. However, their physicality distracts from the
visual enough to create photographic works that instead of seeming like
brushes with death, reassuringly attach Soltau within a life-affirming,
restorative familial string.
is a critic, curator, and an assistant professor of Art History
at Wells College in Aurora, New York. He investigates the relationships among
contemporary art, media technologies, and art markets. His book, Andy Warhol’s
Serial Photography, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2004.
william v. ganis
the journal of media arts and cultural criticism
14
afterimage
AFTERIMAGE 36.4 FEATURE
NOTES 1. Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish” October no. 34 (Fall 1985), 81–90. 2. Ibid., 81. 3. Geoffrey
Batchen, “Vernacular Photographs” in Each Wild Idea (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 56–80. 4. Metz, 83. 5.
Metz states that in cinema, camera pans and scans that reveal continuities of space, and sounds and dialogue that come from
“off-frame” sources or actors, make the exterior (not seen in a given frame) seem robust. See Metz, 83. 6. For an in-depth study
of these works, consult this author’s book: William V. Ganis, Andy Warhol’s Serial Photography (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2004). 7. David Hockney, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques
of the Old Masters (New York: Viking Penguin, 2001). 8. For more discussion regarding simultaneity and other concepts
relating to time, space, and cubism, see Arthur I. Miller, Einstein—Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty that
Causes Chaos (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 9. Metz, 83. 10. Ibid. 11. Two of Soltau’s exhibitions were titled “Time
Experiences.” “Zeiterfahrung” appeared at the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, in 1994–95 and “Zeit-Erfahrung”
was shown at the Giedre Bartelt Galerie, Berlin, in 2001. 12. Metz, 84. 13. This is the well-known ambiguity also found
in Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion, A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Oxford: Phaidon,
1959) and in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. (Oxford: Blackwell,
1978; first published 1953). Joseph Jastrow’s presentation of the rabbit/duck occurs in his article, “The mind’s eye,”
Popular Science Monthly, 54, 312. The image was originally published in Harper’s Weekly (November 19, 1892,
1114). 14. Metz, 84. 15. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Richard Howard, trans.
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 92. 16. Philippe Dubois, “L’Acte Photographique” in L’Acte Photographique and
other essays (Brussels: Editions Labor, 1990), 89. 17. Metz, 83. 18. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York:
Anchor, 1989), 49–82. 19. Peter Wollen, “Fire and Ice,” Photographies 4 (1984). Reprinted in The Photography
Reader, Liz Wells, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003), 76. 20. Carol Mavor, Pleasures Taken: Performances of
Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 53. 21. Ibid., 53–
54. 22. Ute Ritschel, Annegret Soltau: Female Genealogy (New York: Stefan Stux Gallery, 1999), 4 (exhibition
brochure). 23. Kuspit credits Phyllis Greenacre with this analytic interpretation. See Donald Kuspit, Signs of Psyche in
Modern and Post-Modern Art (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 158. See also Phyllis Greenacre,
“Certain Relationships Between Fetishism and Faulty Development of the Body Image,” The Psychoanalytic Study
of the Child 8, 1953, 79. 24. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting,. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, trans.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 90. 25. Annegret Soltau’s Selbst (1975) was included in the exhibition.
This piece consists of fourteen photographs and thread mounted on cardboard. “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution” was
organized by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and also presented at The National Museum of Women in the
Arts, the Museum of Modern Art/PS1, and the Vancouver Art Gallery. See review in Afterimage Vol. 34, no. 6 (May/
June 2007). 26. See review of Mavor’s Reading Boyishly in Afterimage Vol. 35, no. 5 (March/April 2008). 27.
Geoffrey Batchen discusses tactility, collage, and creative expression displayed within common family albums. See Batchen,
68–71. 28. Metz advises the reader of his essay that his use of the term “fetish” should not be read through any psychoanalytic
orthodoxy. Aware of the gulf between theory and praxis Metz finds that the “fetish” concept offers a “power of suggestion.”
Metz and others such as Jacques Lacan read Freud’s theory as an allegory and further explore the missing “phallus” as
metaphor. See Metz, 89–90. The fetish negotiates gendered differences, subjectivity, and even the acquisition of language.
My use in this essay continues such suggestive (not clinical, not therapeutic, not orthodox) metaphorical use. 29. Donald
Woods Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” Playing and Reality (New York: Routledge,
2005), 21. 30. Carol Mavor brings this connection between the fort/da game and Winnicott’s transitional objects to the
reader’s attention in Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J.M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust
and D.W. Winnicott (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 157–58. In turn, she cites Barthes who originated the
Ernst, Freud, Winnicott connection in A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, Richard Howard, trans. (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1978), 126. 31. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, ed./trans. (Toronto: Hogarth Press, 1957), Vol. 18, 14–16. 32. Barthes,
Camera Lucida, 6–7. 33. Kuspit, 157. 34. Melanie Klein, “Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict,” Contributions
to Psycho-Analysis, 1921–1945, Ernest Jones, ed. (London: Hogarth Press, 1948), 208–12. 35. Klein, “Infantile
Anxiety-Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse” in Klein, 235. 36. Kuspit also offers the
following descriptions of the fetish and its functions: “The fetish, in this case, as Robert Stoller notes, is ‘a body part (or
an inanimate related object such as a garment) . . . split off from the whole human object.’ According to (Phyllis) Greenacre
the fetish functions as a “‘new body . . . a sublimely economic condensation’ of the mother’s body that provides, ‘especially
through vision’ the illusory comfort of union with the mother and simultaneously disengagement, detachment, disidentification
from her. The fetishist’s transformation of prosaic objects into poetic symbols is convincing and binding because it reflects the
relationship between mother and child, the most intimate, exclusive and complete relationship there is. It serves to overcome
separation anxiety, thereby satisfying a deeper need than the sexual . . .” See Kuspit, 150. See also Greenacre, 89, 96. See
also Robert J. Stoller, Perversion The Erotic Form of Hatred (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 14. Kuspit does not view
fetishism as an exclusively masculine phenomenon; rather he presents the possibility of feminine fetishism by citing analysts
who think of the penis or phallus as symbolic rather than literal. 37. I can’t help but recall Roland Barthes’s search for the
essence of his dead mother in old photographs from Camera Lucida; “for the truth of the face I had loved,” he writes. The
relation to Soltau’s small print of her father is uncanny, “The photograph is very old. The corners were blunted from having
been pasted into an album, the sepia print had faded . . . He [Barthes’[s] mother’s brother] was leaning against the bridge
railing . . .” Barthes, 67. In some ways, the image of Soltau’s father is antithetical to Barthes’s “winter garden” photograph—
Soltau presents a photograph of a father she has never met and who likely died when she was but an infant; Barthes withholds
an image he describes at length and of a mother he knew intimately in his adulthood. 38. Soltau’s “Vatersuche” constructions
are also a personal version of the postwar identity crisis evident in German Neo-Expressionist works. Her personal loss stands
as an example of the historic loss of not only so many soldiers and citizens, but of a cultural identity bastardized by National
Socialism, and hence forbidden in the sensibilities of the postwar generation. Neo-Expressionist artists, such as Anselm
Kiefer and Jörg Immendorf, who attempt to reevaluate Germanic imagery, literature, and mythology tarnished by National
Socialism, address this loss of cultural identity. 39. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 91.
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