Lili Holzer-Glier : Rockabye

I am looking at Lili Holzer-Glier’s photograph of these kids in post-Sandy Rockaway, part of a series in which she consistently returns to this post-disaster place, but I am thinking of James Agee and his Depression-era collaboration with Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The photographs by Evans of the tenant families and their meager belongings and homes are well known.

Predominantly frontal and flat, the photographs include nothing extraneous. It is as if he adopted subsistence as a value equally applicable to photography as to farming—where paucity permitted life as much as it was a deprivation. We know the photographs of the hard-staring and gaunt faces, and after Sherrie Levine’s photographs—or rephotographs—of these very images in the early 1980s, we know even better that these faces can assume the projections each of us—as authors of their reception—holds. Is that dignity I see? Is that your tragedy? Are you my desperation?

What is lesser known, or perhaps subordinated to the fact and assumed probity of the photographs, is the degree of Agee’s ambivalence, even pessimism, around the project. Shortly after the preface, Agee gives voice to his misgivings, not, I think, to inoculate himself from criticism but rather to initiate the critical process itself. He writes:

It seems to me curious, not to say obscene and thoroughly terrifying, that it could occur to an association of human beings drawn together through need and chance and for profit into a company, an organ of journalism, to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings…for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings….

While Let Us Now Praise Famous Men has frequently been the target of those protesting an image culture that strips agency from the very subjects of photographs, it bears emphasizing that Agee himself initiates that very critique here. I think of Agee and Evans when I look at Holzer-Glier’s photograph of kids playing in a ravaged place. It also confronts the curious act—if not obscenity—of documenting others and their places. In this regard, and from a completely different vantage point, it has almost become gospel to cite the 1972 conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze in which the latter credits the former for “teach(ing) us something fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others. People ridiculed representation and said it was finished, but we failed to draw the consequences of this ‘theoretical’ conversion—to appreciate the theoretical fact that only those directly concerned can speak in a practical way on their own behalf.” But the issue raised by this—important, fundamental—talk of obscenity and of “the other” fails to recognize the spirit of communitarianism running through the most sophisticated cultural practices that rely on documentary methods. To call the work of Evans or Agee or Holzer-Glier simply empathetic or to say that it—as if miraculously—triggers affect denies a politics enacted in the work through formal repetition and physical return. This isn’t to say that the persistent visitor can ever make a place home, but her returns serve as any entreaty. They ask for repetition and proximity to compensate—if inadequately—for being indirectly concerned. Later in the book, Agee emphasizes the necessity of persistence and particularity— the dream of exhaustiveness that haunts the communitarian documentarian/ artist—in articulating the life of the creature at the center. By revisiting and continuing to document it, Holzer-Glier pictures Rockaway not as ruin, not as aftermath, but as alive.

I am looking at the photograph of the two boys in near flight, and I cannot help but think of Icarus. I cannot help but anticipate a fall—a sprained ankle, a broken wrist, something less immediately physical. I see a torn red shirt, a sock pulled down to reveal a piece of bone protruding from skin. I see automatic, begrudged tears and sand in wet eyes. And I am reminded of W.H. Auden’s 1938 “Musée des Beaux Arts,” a poem partly inspired by a Brueghel painting in which the fallen Icarus is barely seen. Lost in the background, only his leg protrudes from a splash and the sea. Auden begins: “About suffering they were never wrong, / The old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position: how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along….”
But why do I presume a fall when looking at Holzer-Glier’s photograph? Why does every flight have to be a crash? I presume suffering because of the other photographs that we see in this book— places, events, and people that Holzer-Glier insists that we don’t forget. But what I imagine as fall can as easily be a perfect flip, two feet on the ground, smiles all around. Or, in the photograph, we can see it for, at least, the inchoate possibility it is. We are always suspended between suffering and joy, hoping that someone will help us see another day.

David Breslin