Asa Mendelsohn on Dillon Chapman
From fragments of desire (an index more than an archive), 2021-ongoing, scan of Polaroid, a rephotograph of a nude, Le fiancé, taken by Hervé Guibert of his lover, the arts worker Thierry Jouno, ca. 1982
[Image description: From a shadowy background, a figure’s blurry face is draped with light sheer fabric. The portrait is framed within the white square of the Polaroid print, and is surrounded by the dark space made by the digital scanner bed.]
You appear from behind a veil of white fabric. Maybe it’s a mesh or a chiffon: a wave of sheer material collects and crests over your crown. It falls in soft pleats down your face. Facing the camera, you give saintly. Ghostly. You give bridal. My gaze hovers at the small imprint made by the corner of your lips, at the dimple of light that marks the base of your neck. I trace that light across your collarbone. I imagine that we’re somewhere private where I prepare your veil. I imagine you consent to wear it for me. You welcome small adjustments. Does this make me the photographer? One of us took off your shirt.
When I begin to describe what I’m seeing, it’s hard not to name the technological artifacts of seeing. What I mean is that I cannot look at you without looking at a Polaroid. Leaving the fantasy in which we have a relationship, I see a spidery mark where the film has developed unevenly near the top-right corner of the image. Nothing is in focus but the frame.
From fragments of desire (an index more than an archive), 2021-ongoing, scan of Polaroid, a rephotograph of a nude by Tom Bianchi, from his photo book Fire Island Pines: Polaroids (1975-1983)
[Image description: Against a background of near-complete darkness, a white, topless model poses for the camera with a wide sideways mouth, head cocked.]
The opening sequence of Céline Sciamma’s 2019 film Portrait of a Lady on Fire moves from face to face. Young artists look up from their work to study their model. The walls of a life drawing classroom are held by the gaze of its students. Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is their instructor and also their model, posing on a small stage in the atelier. If it is conventionally thought — as it was in eighteenth-century France, where Marianne is working — that the artist looks upon her model and claims to draw her truth, Portrait of a Lady on Fire offers that the model also possesses a power to return the look. Truth is not contained within the model or her pose, but is made by the erotic exchange between model and artist.
Dillon Chapman is building an index of looking, that, like Sciamma’s film, intercepts historical, queer relationships between artist and model. From a number of existing institutional and online visual archives, Chapman is amassing a personal collection of source images: nude and semi-nude portraits taken by queer photographers — by gay men in particular, many of them well known within twentieth-century art photography canons. In the archives, sometimes a model is identified as the photographer’s friend or lover. Most of the time, little information is left about who we’re looking at. Who is teaching who, and what is learned by looking?
In her studio in the UTC area of San Diego, Chapman opens a folder of historical nudes on her computer. Using a Polaroid camera, she rephotographs them on her screen, framing closely around the models’ faces. The Polaroid lens cannot focus on anything within the digital image; the result is a blurry print in which both light and shadow are heightened. The rephotographs feature one face per frame, near or off-center, rendered in intense chiaroscuro. The models — history’s gays — often appear as if apparitions under hot stage lights in an otherwise dark theater. If the source images document truths exchanged between artist and muse, Chapman’s rephotographs both exaggerate the visual elements of those exchanges and obscure their details. Light skin blows out, dark skin becomes even more indeterminable.
From fragments of desire (an index more than an archive), 2021-ongoing, scan of Polaroid, a rephotograph of a nude by Arthur Tress, Boy in Central Park (Rambles), 1965
[Image description: From near complete darkness, a white face and breast emerge from behind thin bare tree branches. His eyes are wide, dark splotches, as if in terror]
Reframing can be a technique of leveling. As Chapman frames in on the models’ faces, she endeavors to see them as if at eye level. The composed, sometimes salacious, sometimes sardonic nudes she works from are transformed into moody portraits and fragments that obscure the original position of the photographer in relation to his model. Her images leave out information about the model’s pose, about his body, and about any other figures or environmental information that may have originally appeared within the frame.
From fragments of desire (an index more than an archive), 2021-ongoing, scan of Polaroid, a rephotograph of a nude by Robert Giard, Man on Motorcycle, 1977
[Image description: From near complete darkness, the white form of an abbreviated arm and armpit flex, framing the light half of the model’s mustached face, reclining.]
The writer and photographer Hervé Guibert wrote that the Polaroid camera was first marketed as a child’s toy. In the decades following the company’s founding in 1937, it came to function as a trademark: both a tool and signifier, “like Coca-Cola,” of American hegemony. In contrast to other cameras that required technical expertise and access to a film processing lab, the Polaroid seductively automated development and printing, eclipsing the chemical and manual work involved in making images. For Guibert, writing in the 1980s, Polaroid presented new possibilities for amateur pornography, “freed” from the surveillance of developing labs, from the “paranoia” triggered by an outsider’s gaze. Accordingly, in Chapman’s Polaroids, relationships between artists and models are left resolutely unreadable. Rather, what she is documenting is her own process of looking.
From fragments of desire (an index more than an archive), 2021-ongoing, scan of Polaroid, a rephotograph of a self-portrait by John Dugdale, The Spirit Eye, 1998
[Image description: Face lit by an unknown source and held by two hands that reach down from the top of the image frame, a figure’s head turns to the left. The Polaroid darkens but preserves the blue coloring of the original cyanotype.]
Encountering a wide grid of enigmatic Polaroids laid out across the surfaces of her studio wall and table, I sense the amorous and desiring aspects of Chapman’s practice more directly in my body. While cautious of the racist, cissexist, ableist, and fat-phobic attitudes often reproduced within the overwhelmingly white historical archives of twentieth-century gay male photography, she also admires the men in these images. Through the act of rephotographing, Chapman lifts the historical gays from the context of their lifetimes. At the same time, she makes a place for herself in their intimacies. Her project asks: how do we imagine and depict intimacy when we, as queers, as transsexuals in search of visual legacies, pick up a camera?
And what about this specific camera, the Polaroid? Working in the 2020s, the Polaroid print sits in tense relation to nostalgia for earlier decades of queer life, and to commercial visual culture. I think of Andy Warhol’s iconic Polaroids of artists, performers, cultural workers, and celebrities, some of whom he claimed as muses. Warhol was among other white male artists and influencers of the mid-twentieth century who were given Polaroid cameras, film, and studio time to help popularize the brand. By the end of his life in 1987, he had made more than 20,000 Polaroids. These pocket-sized prints prefigure Instagram, documenting the artist’s attraction to the beautiful and fleeting: the idea, as described by José Esteban Muñoz, writing about Warhol’s endorsement of Coca-Cola, “that utopia exists in the quotidian.”
Yet, while the Polaroid camera may trigger potentially dangerous feelings of nostalgia, its capacity to produce singular documents pushes against this limitation. As Hilton Als reflects, a key, “fascinating” characteristic of Polaroids is their “immediacy… an image that reveals who you are moments after you’ve become it for the camera and your mind’s eye.” If Chapman’s choice of the Polaroid as medium runs the risk of nostalgia, her use of the Polaroid also reanimates the lives that appear before us in fragments and shadow, by giving them a new moment to become themselves.
From fragments of desire (an index more than an archive), 2021-ongoing, scan of Polaroid, a rephotograph of a double nude by Robert Giard, Sunday Morning, 1989
[Image description: Sitting in front of a bright window, the features of a darker-skinned model’s face are hard to make out. The light catches the edge of his bare collarbone and the page of the newspaper in his lap. His eyes are lowered as if reading.]
In the mid-2010s, SFMOMA came into possession of 9,000-plus Polaroid self-portraits created by April Dawn Alison, a clandestine artist who lived a public life as the commercial photographer known as Alan Schaefer (1941-2008). Over several decades, Alison created solo scenes in the privacy of her apartment in Oakland: fantasies and parodies riffing on depictions of white womanhood in popular film and fashion. As Zackary Drucker describes,
“she moves effortlessly from Hollywood screen siren in a tight sweater to frumpy auntie in a high-necked blouse, from pin-up model in a string bikini to dishwashing housewife in rubber gloves, from an efficient French maid in starched white apron to a bound submissive in bra and panties.”
The massive archive Alison left could be thought of as an inverse of Warhol’s: whereas Warhol obsessively captured the publicity of his daily life, Alison documented herself in fastidious privacy. She is her own Diana Vreeland and Liza Minnelli — or, perhaps more accurately, she is her own take on the women who would have looked at their images in magazines. Her photographs convey an intimacy with herself lived in the hours when she is off the clock as Alan. As far as has been narrated, no one in Schaefer’s life knew him as April Dawn Alison. A decade after his death, Alison began a second life as an artist.
From fragments of desire (an index more than an archive), 2021-ongoing, Polaroids
[Image description: A wide grid of 82 Polaroids are laid out against a blue fabric backdrop. Dear gays: fragmented portraits, moody shoulders, jawlines, cheekbones engulfed in light and shadow.]
Reflecting on the exhibition of Alison’s self-portraits at SFMOMA in 2019, Drucker writes that it is impossible, now, to know how Alison saw herself: did she identify as transgender? As a transvestite? A cross-dresser? Did she remain unknown as Alison during her lifetime, fearing the losses she may have suffered? Or was Schaefer happy keeping his life as Alison within the domain of private solo performance? We cannot know definitively, as we cannot know for certain whether she wanted the images she left to be viewed publicly. Maybe she wanted this at certain moments and not at others.
I want to build on Drucker’s reflections to suggest that this may be true, to varying degrees, of any photographic self/portraiture. Finding their image in a photo book, online search, estate sale, or art exhibition, we cannot know how any consenting photographic model, muse, subject, or apparition moves between wanting to be seen and wanting to live in privacy. Invested in an ethics and erotics of becoming, Chapman’s Polaroids remind us to look without claims to knowing.
Asa is Mendelsohn is an artist, writer, and educator based in New York.