Mining the beautiful.

Like other fine arts, the general practice of photography always produces a subjective document, a still moment that has been abstracted from a larger objective reality. By the 1950s, art critic Clement Greenberg used a subjective method of critique, which he had adopted from Immanuel Kant's The Critique of Judgement (1790). (1) Consequently, this form of aesthetic practice focused strictly upon the artistic medium and denied all figurative imagery as a form of art. As recently as 1983, Greenberg stated that photography could only be considered art once it was as good as painting. However, Greenberg's antiquated theory of beauty, as outlined by Kant, was no longer an integral aspect of artistic imagery by the late twentieth century, and it fell far short of properly addressing the presence of beauty within contemporary photography. (2) While the realist image transports the observer's mind further into the depths of imagination, the sensationalist locates the viewer's attention within the horrors of reality. (3) An investigation into the opposing genres within the photographic styles of documentary, fashion, portraiture, and war will reveal that reviling and evocative imagery can indeed be "beautiful."

Disfiguration became an artistic phenomenon in the wake of World War I. Surrealism dismembered the human figure into separate objects playing upon psychological and sexual metaphors that grew out of the anxiety of the moment. Hans Bellmer, for example, staged sculpted caricatures of violently contorted female bodies that alluded to a sadistic desire for either murder or rape. Two gelatin silver prints from Bellmer's 1934 anonymous book The Doll (Die Puppe) depict a figure in various prostrate positions. In the first instance, the artist draped one flimsy doll across a broken chair, as if it had been thrown against a studio prop. The second image captures a female body that does not consist of a face but instead morphs further, growing additional breasts and buttocks. As Hal Foster wrote, "For Bellmer these variations of the first poupee produced a volatile mixture of joy, exaltation, and fear, an ambivalence that sounds fetishistic in nature." (4) Bellmer's work expressed the aggressive tension that underlies desire and was well received in Paris during the late 1930s, although most surrealists preferred not to work with the same visceral subject matter. (5)

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Bellmer's contemporary Man Ray was also working in Paris, creating photographs that depicted fragmented female forms but without the kind of aggression that had characterized Bellmer. Anatomies (1930) and Lee Miller (Neck) (1930), for example, represent the head of a woman that is tipped back and turned away from the camera so that all one sees is the neck's expanse between chin and shoulders. Man Ray's subtle interest in sexual fantasy and gender identity continues in Lee Miller (Torso) (1930), which captures the bare chest of the artist's muse but denies any representation of the sitter's face. Anonymity prevails while minimal form takes on its own aesthetic. Six years prior, Man Ray captured the shapely back of Kiki de Montparnasse in Le Violon d'Ingres (1924), adding a pair of decorative "F"-holes that suggested the model was not just a woman but also an instrument available for play. Man Ray's interest in nuance appeared through his articulation of shadows, used as a contrast that gave shape to form. (6) Moreover, his ability to repeatedly capture the lyrical, passionate pose of each sitter--reclining either as a delicate nude or dressed in light negligee--found a demand outside of surrealism within the pages of Harper's Bazaar, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, where the body was broken down further into various sites for consumption. By the late 1930s Man Ray's uncanny artistic process had already attained significant stature within Modernist artistic discourse since it bridged fashion with art, transforming both into chic and stylish mediums.

The tragic metaphors that first surfaced in surrealist photography became a reality in World War II. This grotesque transformation made war photography a sub-style within photojournalism, moving it beyond the practice of art. Founded in 1936 by Henry Luce, LIFE magazine grew out of the American public's demand for realism that had developed earlier during the Great Depression. Just as the Farm Security Administration employed Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Ben Shahn to capture the socio-economic impact of the Depression across the United States, LIFE sought to further this mission by publishing documentation of as many lived experiences as possible. The visual documentation of public health care, for example, was an important topic. However, this monthly periodical eventually became a repository for photography taken from the front lines of battle during World War II. (7)

During the Vietnam War all published images originally had to be approved by the U.S. military, but soon after Nick Ut's infamous image of a U.S. napalm bomb attack on a Vietnamese village, war photography was no longer a site that depicted a specific government agenda. Instead, it became a vehicle through which the American public came to view the cruel acts of its own military upon innocent civilians. LIFE magazine folded in 1972, most likely as a result of the public's disenchantment with such sensational images. In addition, as war photography became the style that was able to incur the most money, some artists like W. Eugene Smith ventured to stage war scenes within their studios and created false histories that fell into the realm of propaganda. (8)

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Now that the U.S. military once again finds itself at war in Afghanistan and Iraq, an array of media outlets are confronting the public's vision with atrocities. The International Center of Photography (ICP) organized an exhibition in March 2004 of work by the collective VII titled "War in Iraq: Coordinates of Conflict." Established shortly before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, VII presented a chronology of catastrophic events that have led us to where we are today.

James Nachtwey's pictures of the World Trade Center reflect the chaos and reveal dense debris that layered the entire downtown area for months. Even now these images bring back the utter confusion about such an event taking place in this country. Risking his life to photograph the images later published in TIME magazine, Nachtwey stated: "It's ironic that both local and national authorities have continued to refer to the photographs of Ground Zero, when if it had been completely in their power, photographers would have been banned, and we would have been deprived of a valuable, historic legacy." (9)

VII continued working throughout Afghanistan and Iraq, following the path of military combat. Ron Haviv, for example, traveled with the Northern Alliance as they fought against opposing Taliban factions. With a picture of a fatally wounded commander, he forces the observer to witness death and dying. Quite similarly, Nachtwey's portrait of a seven-year-old boy named Khairuddin is just as moving. After learning from the caption that Khairuddin collected pieces of wood chips every day for the sustenance of the family fire, the child's vulnerability becomes even more apparent. The frequently depicted barren landscape makes it clear that the people in Afghanistan have nothing but a wealth of poverty.

The American public's muted response to the decision to go to war was captured as a metaphor in an image by Christopher Morris that portrays a video feed of President George W. Bush on a television screen within an empty airport wing located at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Georgia. Morris also captured the gore of Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq where U.S. soldiers were left with the task of picking up the remains of two suicide bombers. Christopher Anderson wrote, "Kabul falls and the Taliban is on the run. This plays well for television ... Maybe if the aid workers and the Americans see how desperate the [refugee] situation is, something will be done. I try to believe it myself. And so I make these horrible pictures." (10) "War in Iraq" bled narratives of loss on a variety of levels but relocated beauty within the fact that the authentic, unstaged photograph still defined the truth within social context.

The acceptance or rejection of photographs such as these depends largely upon the way that the human figure is represented. In Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag criticizes the viewer of war photography: "One can feel obliged to look at photographs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show." (11) It is not that one does not ponder the visual content within an image of war, but viewers are left to identify with something horrific. Individual and group portraits, for example, function as projections of ourselves causing us to deny what it is that we do not like to look at. This form of denial created a niche for other types of photography, which represented citizens within the moments of mundane, daily life.