Barry Schwabsky’s PictureLibrary: Dream Lives

Debi Cornwall, Chris M Forsyth, Regina DeLuise, Cai Dongdong

One of those little tidbits of information that for years I’ve carried along with me like a talisman—and which for all I know I may have imagined—is that a study once claimed to find that a placebo had a positive effect on patients even when they are informed that they are being given a placebo. Given the evidence of how easily imagination overpowers the reality principle, I am hardly surprised to read, as one does these days, about people falling in love with AI chatbots that they know perfectly well are impersonal mechanisms. It makes sense. Life is a dream. Probably we wouldn’t even have such things as fictions or images if we didn’t need to remould and manipulate our sense of the real.

While most photographers working in the realm of journalism and documentary take some idea of the real as in itself an unquestionable reality, New York-based documentarian Debi Cornwall understands that images model reality in order to naturalize their remaking of it. In 2020 she published a book called Necessary Fictions (Radius Books, Santa Fe, 2020), showing US soldiers participating in pre-deployment training exercises—some with realistic fabricated wounds, others dressed as enemy “ragheads” and so on: projections of a coming actuality. Her new book, Model Citizens (Radius Books, Santa Fe, 2024)—completing a trilogy that began with Welcome to Camp America (Radius Books, Santa Fe, 2017)—takes up a similar theme by depicting role-playing at the US Border Patrol Academy, historical dioramas at museums around the country and, perhaps most disturbingly, “at Donald Trump’s ‘Save America’ rallies … where scores of followers arrive in costume to perform their citizenship outside rally venues in the hours before doors open.” It’s a big, imposing book—a sort of monument to simulation.

It’s usually (though not always) obvious in Model Citizens when we’re seeing a mannequin in a diorama rather than a living person. Hint: many of the real humans’ faces in these intensely hued pictures are hidden—turned away, buried in shadow, or even lost in the gutter of an image laid out across a two-page spread (a thing I usually abhor but often used effectively here). (I should also point out Cornwall’s brilliant use of her book’s French fold construction to break many of her images across her pages’ recto and verso, doling visual information out in controlled doses.) But how can one tell these staged training exercises from real operations on the southern border? Maybe the clue is in how composed the images are; they hardly reflect the confusion and urgency of an inherently unpredictable and potentially violent situation. And yet, without the captions given at the back of the book, I wouldn’t have laid money on their all being exercises. Remember, they are not exactly staged; there’s improvisation going on, and the border patrol trainees are, presumably, learning to expect the unexpected—which means the photographer had to do the same. On the other hand, the rituals performed by the MAGA supporters are all too real—sincere as can be—despite and because of their exhibitionary and also premonitory nature. The participants can commune in a sharing of patriotic fervour and the hope for its spread in a nation soon to be made great again—whether they feel that fervour or not.

The state of Montana has, apparently, been Great Again all along, seeing as how Donald Trump handily won the state’s electoral votes by wide margins three times in a row—but just under 20% in 2024. In his new book Montana Road Wreck (Push Pull Editions, Corvallis, Oregon, 2024; edition of 100 with a second printing announced), for which he took an Honourable Mention in the 2023 Burtynsky Grant competition, Montreal-based photographer Chris M Forsyth examines the Big Sky Country’s sparsely populated landscape through an ominous formal device: each richly detailed black and white image is centred on a white cross. Shining brightly against the moody greys of the terrain’s dry grasses and soil, these might at first seem to have been superimposed, maybe by Photoshop, but no, look more closely: each identical cross is made of two white rectangles bolted to each other and to a pole. Occasionally, two or more of these crosses are bolted together. On facing pages are scattered bits of text, apparently excerpted from many years’ worth of journalistic reports on Montana’s high rate of road deaths and its longtime eschewal of any numerical speed limit during daylight hours, specifying instead that speeds should be “no greater than is reasonable and proper under the conditions existing at the point of operation.” In short, it has been an exacerbated form of American individualism—the desire to be untrammelled by bureaucratically or governmentally mandated norms—that has led to the thousands of automotive deaths, each of which is marked by one of these crosses. What’s astonishing is how many of the crosses mark spots where there seem to be no roads in sight. How did they even find something to crash into there? “Blame it on the West’s vast and lonesome spaces,” one commentator says, where “drivers hurtle from one remote outpost to the next like spaceships through a universe of grass and sage, sand and rocks.” It’s that forlorn realm we see in Forsyth’s pictures. Forsyth’s subject might seem of merely local interest, and the absolute uniformity of these mute memorials might render this avoidable human toll a mere abstraction. But the meditative quality with which he embraces each scene in depth keeps the seriousness of the sacrifices we make to the deity of personal liberty.

“I would like to be able to take a photo of a dream”—that epigraph from the French feminist writer Hélène Cixous opens The Hands of My Friends (Saint Lucy Books, Baltimore, 2024), an impressive compendium of more than 40 years’ worth of work—100-plus images, including a few drawings— by Baltimore-based photographer Regina DeLuise. After reading that seemingly unattainable wish, I had a second thought: Doesn’t every photograph encapsulate a dream—something with a spectral and unsettled relationship with daily existence—at least until it’s been nailed to reality with words? As journalistically accurate as the images like the ones in Model Citizens and Montana Road Wreck may be, in themselves, they feed our eyes on honeydew, as Coleridge might have said, visionary apparitions whether of pleasure or war. But DeLuise, it seems—unlike Cornwall or Forsyth—wants to hold her oneiric perceptions in the pure state, without documentary support. But that doesn’t make her a surrealist; if anything, she’s a sort of belated pictorialist, albeit disguised as a straight photographer. As they pass through her 8x10 view camera, the forms of everyday people and things—domestic objects such as furniture, glassware, pictures; landscapes; but nothing of modern urban life—reveal themselves as phantasmic. Her delicate web of grey tones slows the gaze; one can almost feel the light working its way slowly forward to meet the eye.

That’s why, although more of the pictures have people in them than not, and while in her introductory essay DeLuise speaks of some of her images as portraits, I don’t think that’s the right word for her pictures of people. In a closing essay, the cultural historian Felicia McCarren (presumably the Felicia named in the titles of five of the pictures) writes, “The photographs that the photographer gives the world are not about us, the subjects of her camera.” I wouldn’t even speak, as McCarren does, of likenesses. DeLuise does not show me what these people and things are like, and hardly even, in many cases, what they look like. If anything, they show how enigmatic the existence of people and things can seem—how little we can know of what we know well. I think that’s why DeLuise is drawn to old things, places that look like they’ve hardly changed in a century; an enviable number of them are set in the Italian countryside. Likewise, when she shows people, she is interested (non-pruriently) in their fleshly being, and their clothing gives little clue as to its place in the constantly changing timeline of fashion. New things, things that speak about contemporaneity, tempt us to interpret them; more settled realities more readily exhibit their opacity.

And that reminds me of another good epigraph: “When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep.” Those lines from Genesis begin the story of the dream in which Jacob saw the angels going up and down their stairway to heaven. Cai Dongdong, like DeLuise, begins by invoking the dreamlike status of photographic images. And the dream is the dream of a wanderer, an exile. In a brief afterword to his book Passing By Beijing (self-published, Beijing, 2024), Cai explains that it compiles colour pictures (about 130 of them, by my estimate) made between 2002 and 2022—just before and mostly since he moved to China’s capital from the country’s northwest. The book does not provide dates or any other information about the individual images.

Cai calls himself an artist “engaged in various forms of photography-related practices,” but adding, “I have never been able to call myself a professional photographer.” Another recent publication, Left Right (self-published, Beijing, 2024, edition of 300), shows him as a conceptual artist working with photographs as ready-mades. It’s an ingeniously constructed object: a hard cover encloses two compact paperback books, the one on the left labelled Right and the one on the right labelled Left; both open toward the centre, mirroring each other. Right contains more than 100 found photographs—mostly close-up portraits as might be used for official purposes but also some more casual shots of people in landscapes—made between 1912 and 1949 (which is to say, between the fall of the Qing Dynasty and the advent of the People’s Republic), while Left contains the same number of pictures taken between 1949 and 1978. But each photograph matches the corresponding one on the other side. Cai observes, “The comparison and contrast” illustrate “changes in the appearance of women and men as mapped by the different social systems and ideologies of the two periods.” But to me as a foreigner, the continuities between the two groups of images are far more vivid than the contrasts. Conventions of self-presentation turn out to be far more durable than ideological precepts.

In Passing By Beijing, though, Cai displays his self-proclaimed amateurism in photographs he’s taken himself. He doesn’t mind blur, overexposure, or anything else a how-to book would label a mistake. Yet, he says, the camera is always with him, and the thousands of rolls of film he accumulated became a sort of unconscious diary. For viewers like me who know nothing of Beijing, it’s helpful to learn what might not have been obvious, that these pictures “always depict scenes of the edge of the city,” a “rural-urban fringe,” and that this fringe has constantly receded over the past two decades: “When I just came to Beijing, I rented a room in a hutong on the Second Ring Road, and then moved to the Third, the Fourth, the Fifth, and then the Sixth Ring Road.” That in itself sounds like something that happens in a dream: you keep moving and moving and always staying in the same place.

Cai’s Beijing is one in which things seen can never quite be grasped. Almost everything appears to be perfectly ordinary—well, I said almost: not a globe in flames on the ground; not a partially clad body sprawled lifelessly at the foot of a tree while bystanders, at a distance, take pictures with their cellphones—but the significance of its being noticed is opaque. Even the colour of things seems somehow indefinite much of the time. But space is wide and deep; the eye can wander, melancholy as it may be. The accumulation of these half-grasped moments suggests that technical mistakes tell their own truth: that seeing belongs to the outside of phenomena, things that pass by as in dreams. But it’s the dreamy who remains most ghostly. ❚

Barry Schwabsky’s recent books of poetry are Feelings of And (New York: Black Square Editions, 2022) and Water from Another Source (New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2023). Forthcoming is an essay, “Midcareer” (Los Angeles: Ten O’Clock Project).