Daniel Zhang
Space is the existence in which the concept inscribes its differences as it would in an empty, dead element in which the differences themselves are just as unmoved and lifeless. The actual is not something spatial as it is taken to be…one might presume that time, as the counterpart to space, would constitute the material of the other division of pure mathematics, but time is the existing concept itself.
— G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit
History, the old wound…to relive the same folly. To name it now so as not to repeat history in oblivion. To extract each fragment by each fragment from the word from the image another word another image the reply that will not repeat history in oblivion.
— Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee
“Parallel” is perhaps the most insubstantially marshaled verb in contemporary analytic writing. A metonymic imposter has eroded the word’s original mathematical clarity. It is now a weak gesture of noting approximate resemblance or resonance: any two things can “parallel” one another if you squint hard enough.
My preoccupation with this word stems from the belief that any sentence hinged upon such a vague use of the word “parallel” cannot advance much hermeneutic ground. In what follows, I hope to examine this claim by considering the geometric rigor of a parallel’s exceptionally singular properties as an alternative. With this lens, I will review the curious and precarious pairing of Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In at the National Portrait Gallery (March 21 to June 16, 2024). It will then be your task to review whether or not my intervention against the word “parallel” is at all helpful. It would perhaps be apt to say that three parallel reviews are afoot.
Parallel lines never meet.
The negative definition is crucial to demonstrating the rarity of parallel lines. Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron never met, considering the former was born in 1958 and worked in New York City, Providence, and Rome, while the latter was born in 1815 and lived in colonial Calcutta and London. Cameron was an early pioneer of photography and used a wooden sliding box camera to make albumen prints with glass plates and collodion. Woodman made silver gel film prints. This material difference is visible in the radial jaundice of Cameron’s prints. Woodman never explicitly references Cameron’s work, though she was perhaps aware of it as an astute student of Western art history. Woodman began taking photos at the age of 13, trained at the Rhode Island School of Design, and assumed photography as a vocation through a series of prestigious fellowships. Cameron began taking photos at the age of 48; she was self-taught and, in her time, largely dismissed as an amateur. Woodman sought literary solace in Proust and Breton; Cameron, in her dear friend Tennyson. Woodman jumped out of a window on the East Side of Manhattan when she was 22. Cameron died in an estate in Sri Lanka at the age of 63. Her last word is reputed to be “beautiful.”
By many means, it makes little sense to pair these two photographers. Traditional methodologies — from reception theory to historicism to formalism — do not seem to capture how exactly they are in dialogue. Indeed, curator Magdalene Keaney concedes in her brilliant catalog essay, “Perhaps, then, allowing the preoccupations of Woodman to affect a reading of the photographs of Cameron and vice versa has been a precarious undertaking…this exhibition, and this book, have embraced that risk.”
What exactly is being risked? Keaney’s use of the word “preoccupations” is telling: to occupy one frame of mind prematurely is to dilute the hermeneutic purity of the inquiry. Such a purity is obviously elusive, perhaps even fictive, but arguably still normative in the popular conception of a serious scholar — from the coolly detached Cartesian subject to the sterile, disembodied New Critic. Reading one artist through another may risk myopic attachment, if not flagrant embellishment. The problem is one of timing. To arrogantly assume a preoccupation before an encounter with the object of criticism is to negate the autonomy of its presentness and sublimate it to a prior concern.
Why would a critic want to be occupied, let alone preoccupied, then? Kearney suggests that what we find in both artists’ work is “a central overlapping concern, like the eye shape in a simple two-circle Venn diagram.” In a review very concerned about the metaphor of geometry, this does not sit quite right with me. The Venn diagram limits possibilities. It reduces comparison to essentialization and then extraction, as if what we could learn from this exercise is already contained in each individual oeuvre. But I would argue that the work at hand here is not one of clarification but of creation: to compare is not to refine but to expand the field of interpretive possibilities.
The figure of the parallel makes more sense to me precisely because, unlike in a Venn diagram, the lines do not touch. The precarious task is to imagine and intuit what conversations happen in the vacuous infinite space between the lines. The silliness of this sentence indexes the risk of Keaney’s project — to understand how the affective textures of Woodman and Cameron’s photographs extend beyond the bodies of works themselves and into the noisy realm of perception. What exhibits like these propose is a serious treatment of the illogical, intuitive, and necessarily unrigorous space operative in any human act of visual comparison. Perhaps one has more sympathy now for the casual distortions inflicted upon the word “parallel” as it exits the spatial realm and enters the linguistic.
Keaney names this space between Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron the “dream space”: a heuristic located in “not only the intention to depict an experience of a vision, fantasy or the subconscious…[but] also an invitation for the viewers themselves to dream.” This “dream space” is not lacking in concrete anchorage: allegorical classicism, compositional doubling, and the thoroughly premeditated nature of both artists’ processes are particularly compelling points of departure. The “dream space,” however, loses its force when reduced to these interpretive punchlines. They must serve only as trailheads for the viewer’s engagement—the real work begins when we are lost in the woods.
The mathematically inclined will realize I have already made a mistake. I have presumed the neatness of Euclidean space, itself a heuristic inaccurate to a post-general relativity world where parallel lines can intersect in curved space. Woodman would have been one of these readers. In her artist book, Some Disordered Interior Geometries, she reveals a sustained obsession with the laws of mathematics, questioning “where I fit in this odd geometry of time.”
A casual mutilation of time is its representational expression in the spatial (and vice-versa). Thus we find ourselves relying upon the adverb of time “never” (or its positive counterpart, “always”) when defining the spatial phenomenon of a parallel, though upon closer examination this makes no sense.
2. Parallel lines are always the same distance apart.
The preeminent genre both photographers selected was portrait historié, allegorical framing through precise choreography, complete with prop and costume. Consider Woodman’s treatment of Ovid (mediated in part through Piero del Pollaiuolo’s Apollo and Daphne) in Untitled (1980):
Francesca Woodman
Untitled, 1980
Gelatin silver print
10 5/8 x 13 1/2 in. (26.99 x 34.29 cm)
© Woodman Family Foundation / Artists
Rights Society (ARS),
New York.
In the first row, the subject’s alert engagement with the camera suddenly plummets into distant interiority. She hides her arms. In the next row, pairs of thin trunks thrust upward, hemmed by cropping. A substitution is made: a bright white arm, swathed in fabric resembling wood. In the next instance, you can hardly tell skin apart from its twin branch. In the final photo of the middle row, the wielder is revealed. The subject reappears with arms forward, acknowledging her deception.
As Apollo relentlessly chased her through the woods, Daphne pleaded for her father to rid her of her body, which nimium placui — pleased too well. She was transformed into a laurel tree. The Metamorphoses’ ending is rather perverse, with Apollo ultimately wielding and donning Daphne’s new body in the new guise of a wreath. But with Woodman’s Daphne, the perversity is yours. It is as if you are playing a game: the lateral middle arrangement at once simulates and provokes the tracking of a predatory eye to find the next scrap of skin hidden among the forest. The trompe l’oeil stupefies the viewer’s carnivorous gaze in a moment of confusion. The gratification of visual pleasure once the eye finds skin is all the more satisfying. Thus Woodman animates the spatial grid with temporal experience.
The consequence of this is an embodied experience of culpability. The title of the exhibit derives its name from Woodman’s conception of photography as a place for the “viewer to dream in” — an art that does not merely “record reality [but] offer[s] images as an alternative to everyday life.” But dreams can be voyeuristic, narcissistic exercises of power. Woodman makes explicit the sadism of the Ovidian listener who delights in violent, mythical etiologies (to don a laurel wreath is to conquer a woman’s body). You, the voyeur-viewer, destructively inscribe an alternative image upon reality, as Apollo upon Daphne, in real time.
Julia Margaret Cameron
Daphne (Mary Pinnock), 1866-68
© Ashmolean Museum,
University of Oxford
Compare Woodman’s treatment to Cameron’s Daphne (Mary Pinnock). An immediate difference: the parenthetical acknowledgment of the conceit behind any allegorical portrait. A pre-Raphaelite logic of femininity recasts the tragic Daphne in the company of fellow Victorian manic pixie idols Ophelia and The Lady of Shallott. Leaves and flowers that mount higher and higher from her chest serve as both ornament and cause of death. The manual focus sacrifices the shallow plane — the blurred hair and flowers — for scraps of her face, even as it turns away. Her slightly agape mouth, slightly-past-profile lilt, and searching eyes situate her as remote yet affected. Affected by whom? The moment of transfiguration is already incipient; the battle has been lost. What we witness is the work of the transformer — diegetically speaking, her father, but another paternal presence and agent of metamorphosis looms near: the artist herself.
Something has been done to Mary Pinnock — she has been transfigured by Cameron as Daphne was by Ovid. What does it mean to cast someone in the image of a victim of sexual violence — Pinnock’s print carried around like a trinket just as Apollo donned the laurel wreath — and what is the impulse of Cameron to transform her? Susan Sontag once wrote of photography as a “soft murder,” a wielding of “knowledge of [the subject] that they can never have” in On Photography. The tyranny of the artists’ choreography emerges beyond only the slightest veil. As Pinnock looks away from us, toward a direction we cannot understand in flat space, we are made aware of a consciousness that has been irrevocably submerged by the artist’s vision.
Amidst this drama, it stands to say that Woodman and Cameron’s subjects are evidently not Daphne. But they have no individual subjectivity with which to speak: any voice comes through the parted lips of a laurel tree. They have been preoccupied, so to speak, by Woodman and Cameron’s concern with Daphne.
Thus we can remember the stakes of preoccupation. Two parallel lines stand: the presentness of the photographer’s claim and the nebulous distance of the mythical past. Any autonomy of the subject is sundered between the possession of both parties. In an obvious sense these two lines cannot commune with one another — the real life subjects are only wearing bark sleeves and pinned flowers. Parallel lines can never intersect.
Yet a real and permanent rupture has been made, the violence of which both Woodman and Cameron understand as a formal quality of photography. As Walter Benjamin observes in “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” “the feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera…is basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before one’s own image in the mirror. But now the reflected image has become separable, transportable.” The last two words are essential: if the image is no longer contingent upon the subject, but rather exists as a freewheeling entity, then the subject might as well not exist.
The consequences here come from a parsing of time. This is related to — but ultimately not — the familiar critique that images bear a spurious relationship to reality, a point hammered home by thinkers from Plato to Baudrillard. What is at stake is the paralysis of a real experience of time. In other words, if the violence inflicted upon Daphne is a fungible phenomenon that can be iteratively reinscribed upon present subjects, then there is no possibility of change. Reality becomes subsumed by a ceaseless, uniform mass — or as James Joyce put it, history then becomes a nightmare from which one tries to awake. What comparing Woodman and Cameron elucidates is the crucial role of the image in such an operation.
History does not unfold within the image but unfolds within the lived world. It is this very conflation — the suspension of disbelief that portrait historié requires — that sustains the seeming impossibility of change. Right underneath the works of Woodman and Cameron is real violence, violence that cannot be metaphorized. As the example of non-Euclidean space demonstrates, you cannot rely upon the distance between parallel lines. You may find that you are standing on curved ground and they approach without your notice.
3. Parallel lines are infinite.
A photograph alludes to infinity by rendering the moment, necessarily self-negating by the imperative of another moment’s immediate succession, in permanent existence. Sontag extends this observation to the ethical realm: “To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.”
Once again we witness the casual slippage — or should we say necessary entanglement — of space and time. The photograph immediately presents itself as a synchronic medium; no passage of time can be experienced within the purely spatial field of a print (if one can convince themselves to bracket the print’s materiality, a slightly ridiculous but all too casually performed act). Yet both Woodman and Cameron’s portraits stage an abrasion between the temporality of their subject and the temporality of their allegory.
If we accept the unilateral temporality of the photograph as one of its essential formal qualities, then the truly radical stakes of the artists’ projects emerge. They are working against their medium, and in doing so, approaching a more authentic phenomenological account — one which acknowledges time as the structure in which we live and act. There can be no illusion that photographs are spatial indexes of reality for there is no such thing as a solely spatial reality. They are “alternative[s] to everyday life” — not life itself. Thus we see the hermeneutic risk of petrification lurking within the photograph: a timeless flattening of the uncritically repeated, ceaselessly iterative logic which justifies our preoccupations.
I now conclude my review by asking for yours (I hope you have not forgotten!). What is to become of the word “parallel”? I return to the epigraphs, as the epigraph is the most unsuspectingly commanding medium of preoccupation. For Hegel, what is pernicious about the “empty, dead” spatial is that it is “incapable of dealing with that pure restlessness of life and its absolute difference.” Time is necessary to animate the world into reality — it is the “existing concept itself.” For Cha, the reply of “another word another image” is the ethical project that secures escape from the “oblivion” of metastasized history. Perhaps this is what Woodman put her finger on when she mused upon the “geometry of time” so palpable in her work despite the photograph’s tendency to sublimate the latter to the former.
I gestured toward an undiluted use of the word “parallel” at the beginning of this review, one existing prior to or outside of the semantic transformations of history. Such a gesture now seems specious rather than an innocent rhetorical device. Yet perhaps it was this very indulgence of the definition “alternative to everyday life” that created my passage back to the real world. In other words, I have preoccupied myself with parallels to say something about portraits, but it appears as if the preoccupations of portraits have taught me something about parallels. Now I can only hope that this portrait of parallels has said something about preoccupations. As the poet Richard Siken put it,
The wind knocks the heads of the flowers together.
Steam rises from every cup at every table at once
Things happen all the time, things happen every minute
that have nothing to do with us.
Things happen as I write. Things happen as you read. Woodman wondered where she fit in this odd geometry of time. I wonder where I fit in this odd time of geometry. You may never meet these things that happen every minute, that have nothing to do with us. But there is a word for two things which never meet.