“The human subject needs to protect itself against the loss of the object (i.e. the always absent real object of desire) and the loss of identity.” 1.
Suzanne Mejean returned at the end of last summer from an extended road trip of America. During her travels she visited military families around the country to find out how they cope with the deployment of loved ones. Initial research on this topic quickly led her to Elaine Dumler’s book I’m Already Home, and to the discovery of flat-daddies. Flat-daddies are life-sized photo portraits, primarily of fathers, offered to military families as a ready-made. They have enjoyed word-of-mouth popularity while websites post positive and humorous testimonials.
Communicating through Dumler’s newsletter, Mejean introduced her intention to make a film and photographs on the subject and sought families to visit. With a map of the US, a car, video and still cameras, plus thirty families to meet, she set off across America in June 2007. Her dizzying zigzag trip from the West Coast to the East, North, South and back put 17,000 miles on the car, captured one hundred hours of videotape and interviews, and recorded 150 still photographs that serve as a parallel, second narrative.
Five of these photographs are published here, environmental portraits of families and individual children. The images relinquish their documentary function to the video and interviews, allowing for a more vulnerable and contemplative frame. They provide a pause or oasis from the emotional stories of post-traumatic stress syndrome and extended tours of duty.
The subjects (visibly) and the photographer (invisibly) position themselves in these pictures, commemorating their shared encounter. Mejean’s work looks at how photographs capture the tensions and fears that surface when talking about death, loss, or desperate times, as well as the function and impact of the flat-daddy when everyday family life has been suspended. As a memory aide or a visual support for families, the images explore the psychological conditions that shape the relations between images, children, parents, and actual fathers. Meanwhile, spouses and children wait for the missing one to return.
At home and in Iraq or Afghanistan there are sensitivities that limit the scenes that can be seen, and what can be imaged or imagined. Daddy is both here and not here—he is over there in harm’s way and also here at the dinner table, in the van, on the porch, and at the football game. These familiar, uncanny, flattened bodies turn fathers into images or objects of affection, yet they are also disembodied selves stuck in the limbo of non-death. The security of being an object that can be touched and carried yields to the image that has been frozen in time; the illusion of security is nomadic and can easily be placed in a shadow world. An infinite number of selves can be reproduced, but mostly it is a binary affair—a military doppelganger. New and ambiguous histories proliferate. Flat-daddies appear to function in a liminal space/time continuum, between the real and the fictive. Time is alternatively delayed, repeated, and deployed in reverse, then and now folding in and upon each other.
Similarly, space relations acquire fantastic proportions as the doubled self can be in more than one place at a time. Flat-daddies become even more paradoxical when we begin to question the status of memory and selective amnesia. Questions emerge including what reality to refer to when an image is substituted for a father, and whether a real father can replace the flat daddy upon return from service. It is also necessary to consider what to do with a flat-daddy when the serviceman does not return, or returns with injuries that contradict the imaginary wholeness of the picture. These strange and uncharted relations may result in long-term effects.
The simple elegance of Mejean’s photographs returns a respectful gaze, offering additional time to consider the specificity of each person and locale. The images are mute, but not silent, slices of time where light returns from its journey through the interior and rests on the surface for us to see.
Robert Blake
1. Victor Burgin, quoted by Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
Suzanne Mejean lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
She Participated in Light Work's Artist-in-Residence program in January, 2007.
Robert Blake is a photographer, writer and video artist who resides in New York City and leads the General Studies Program at the International Center of Photography. ©2009-2013
Locations Filmed:
ALABAMA
Kelly, Alex and Lake Black
ARKANSAS
Ginny Adams
CALIFORNIA
Sherri, Mike and Shane Hutton
Michael and Michael-Alexander Little
Pat and Ken Schurman
Derek Fly
Virginia, Nicci, Sandra and Ryley Tallman
COLORADO
Jessica, Faith and Tyler Lundstrom
Sally and Cassandra Webster
Elaine Dumler
CONNECTICUT
Sandra, Louisa and Lucas Pearl
GEORGIA
Alaina and Savannah McDonald
KENTUCKY
Tammie, David and Michael Henderson
Marcella Gibson
LOUISIANA
Kathy and Sterlin Tatum
MAINE
Barbara Claudel
MICHIGAN
Nicole, Samantha, Ryan and Alyson Cadotte
MINNESOTA
Laura and Emma Cloose
Stacey, Lukas, Morgan, Ethan and Adam Bielke
MISSISSIPPI
Adrian, Ranae, Taylor, Gracie and Haley Caldwell
Calvin and Rakeshei Robinson
Samantha Wade
Holly, Madeline and Taylor Boyd
Miranda and Drew Goddard
Connie, Cailee Beth and Cora Yeilding
NORTH DAKOTA
Cindy Sorenson and Sarah Bruschwein
NEW JERSEY
Rhonda, Caroline, Trisha and Haley Dring
OHIO/SFC GRAPHICS
Eric Crockett
Gretchen Roundtree
Ryan Straube
Thomas Clark
Ryan Hertzfeld
TEXAS
Tammie, Luke and Cole Warren
Ashley and Logan Klein
Carey, Jacob, Rebekah, Stephen, Abigail and Daniel Quick
UTAH
Amaria, Creighton, Logan, Cassidy and McCall Scovil
VERMONT
Elizabeth, Oliver, Abigail and Ethan Roy
WASHINGTON
Allison, Ethan and Esther Buckholtz
Theresa and Kaitlyn Chelberg
ARTIST STATEMENT
Initially it was John Coplans’ fragmented body/self portraits that influenced my ideas. He confirms, by its conspicuous absence, that the face has been the traditional attribute associated with identity. By denying the face as a personal marker, Coplans returns the body to its formal, specific and intimate character. My result was that of an unintended performance, which, when considering the images, appeared contrived. I was the mask in my own search of self. I eliminated self-portraiture and photographed my mother to find the self by way of collaboration.
Returning home and photographing family, as can be seen in Larry Sultan’s Photographs from Home, opens a set of relations that are intimate and question the position of observer/observed within a classed, gendered and ethnic framework. Every gesture with the camera is also autobiographical in nature. I used my mother as the nominal subject and a site onto which I could project/protect myself as an examination of identity. To attempt to know oneself was to explore the projections I placed on the other. These identifications and projections were contingent on one another and as Abigail Solomon Godeau writes, are “inextricably joined to the investigation of both.” I found I could occupy multiple subject positions beyond the status of photographer; I could be myself and the other.
Trauma is unavoidable in the process of individuation, as Hal Foster discusses in The Return of The Real, traumatic realism and the construction of the gaze are central issues in photography. Within an inflated and partially fabricated reality, my mother navigated physical pain, as I was tethered to emotional grief. Her condition mirrored mine as trauma’s echo. Her accident produced in us a fatalistic mind-set. Every element of the wound, her medication and its symptoms, were over-dramatized, addictive and a reminder to me of my inevitable death; a memento mori. I was attracted to her condition because this impairment brought to mind the dynamic of our past relationship. This memory was evoked even though our roles as mother/child were reversed. The theatrical décor mimicked our exchange. The ornately upholstered interiors merged with the inflammation of her compromised health. But if trauma was my window to the real, and a result of projected exaggerations, was my “real” a delusion?
Just as Barthes suggests that the subject departs the unmoving object, my attraction faded as my mother healed. Playing less of a role within A Collaborative Self Portrait and becoming more of an observer of a reclaimed life, I wondered if this critical distance could achieve a greater sense of self. Demonstrative in its apt critique of a vacuous and narcissistic world, Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism and photographers exploring hyperrealism provided further context for the work. I returned the focus to her as [m]other. She was another woman and hard-wired into her mind was a constructed self, repressing the other, painting a mask. These set boundaries produced a script, an Original Fiction (Spinoza). I examined the possibility of a perpetual mask. Typically, on the surface, the mask plays a role related to vanity, but operates beyond this within narcissism and fear as can be seen in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. No longer in collaboration, but in silent battle, we were nevertheless involved in another form of exchange.
The inevitable question of posing involves the discussion of authentic experience. I researched photographer, Gillian Laub’s maneuvers through the idea of the pose within her family work; using snapshots as blue prints to re-pose an un-posed scene. My images are posed and many are manipulated to feign reality. Revealing this aspect acknowledges and questions its relationship to the position of the gaze as either direct, yielding a confirmed exchange, or averted. “I arrange myself, not my subject” (Diane Arbus), therefore the continuous pose/performance and awareness of the eye was a facet of my mother’s character I attempted to expose by imitating it in my own process. The exchange between her representation of herself and the way I chose to represent that picture offered to me suggests that perhaps “there is no real outside of representation or…no access to the real unmediated by representation.” (Godeau) From having established a point of view as doubled, to viewing the one as other, I was in dialogue with the uncanny. This recalled the work of Sarah Jones, whose subjects, set amidst interiors of “home” and experiencing similar encounters with the “unheimlich”, endure feelings of estrangement from the “heim” (Freud’s The Uncanny). I came to know my mother in a different light. I realized The Truth of [her] Masks (Oscar Wilde) as they melted into her face. Reflecting back on my own performance, I wondered if in fact that had been the self I sought, looking right back at me in my initial photograph, the idea of which also recalls both Gillian Wearing’s Album and Georges Franju’s film, Eyes Without a Face.
The conflation of the nature of the medium with the position of the author informs the project in both parts and concludes that in fact it is a “portrait” of neither of us but rather a picture of an exchange. Between photographer and subject exists a compromise of the intended and the uncontrollable, the chance. Though we would like to be, we are not always in charge of the script. It is my intentions that make any image my own and my mother’s impressions that make/show her, as transparently as her resurrected identity. The images, “like a death mask” (Susan Sontag), reveal no soul. They do not strip down to “the truth” conceivably because it is right there, on the surface. Maybe truth is difficult to find because we search for it. Perhaps it is not something that is hidden and needs to be found, but rather needs to be seen, recognized as such and exposed. So often the mask is discarded in a valiant attempt to “find the real you,” but, within this examination, I have realized that it is not about the surface of the photograph but about the surface of the subject. The surface is evidence of what is chosen, like the frame; it is where intention lives and where the truth lies.
Suzanne Méjean Pinney
“They say, namely, that what the mind can sense and in many ways perceive is not the mind itself nor existing things but only things that are neither in themselves or in any place; which means that the mind solely by its own power can create sensations and ideas which are not of real things. This amounts to regarding the mind partially as God. They say further that we, or our minds, have a freedom of such a kind that we constrain ourselves, that is, our minds, and indeed our very freedom. For after having contrived some fiction and given it its assent, the mind can no longer conceive or fashion it in any other way, and it is also forced by its fiction to conceive of other things in the same manner in order not to oppose the original fiction....”
Baruch Spinoza, On the Correction of Understanding