WAR'S IMAGINATION: THE EMBODIMENTS OF AN IMAGE

“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.

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

A COLLABORATIVE
SELF PORTRAIT

ARTIST STATEMENT

My early work was deeply influenced by John Coplans’ fragmented body/self-portraits. By omitting the face—long regarded as the quintessential marker of identity—Coplans reclaims the body’s formal and intimate qualities, distancing it from personal identification. This revelation shaped my approach, resulting in an unintended performance that, upon reflection, appeared contrived. In my own search for self, I became the mask. To push beyond self-portraiture, I turned the lens toward my mother, collaborating with her to navigate my own identity through another.

Photographing family, much like Larry Sultan’s Pictures from Home, opens up intimate relationships and challenges the role of observer and observed within classed, gendered, and ethnic frameworks. Every gesture with the camera is autobiographical. My mother became both subject and surface for my exploration of self, projecting onto her as a way to protect and examine identity. As Abigail Solomon-Godeau suggests, these identifications and projections are inextricably bound, each investigation reliant on the other. I found I could occupy multiple subject positions—both myself and the other.

Trauma is integral to 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 exaggerated, partially fabricated reality, my mother’s physical pain mirrored my emotional grief. Her accident bonded us in a fatalistic mindset—her wounds, medications, and symptoms became a memento mori for me, a reminder of my own mortality. I was drawn to her suffering because it echoed the dynamic of our past relationship, even as our roles reversed. The theatrical décor of her surroundings reflected this exchange, as our shared history became entangled with the ornate interior and her compromised health. Trauma, though a window to the real, felt illusory, raising the question: was my “real” a delusion?

As Roland Barthes posits, the subject inevitably departs the unmoving object. As my mother healed, my attraction to this dynamic faded. I shifted from collaborator to observer of a reclaimed life, contemplating whether this distance could yield a deeper understanding of self. Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and the work of photographers exploring hyperrealism provided further context. I returned to my mother as subject, now viewing her as an [m]other—a woman embodying a constructed self, her own mask repressing the other. Bound by this script, a perpetual mask emerged, one that transcended vanity and delved into deeper realms of narcissism and fear, much like in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. Our collaboration evolved into a silent, yet profound, exchange.

The act of posing inevitably raises questions about authentic experience. In my research, I explored Gillian Laub’s approach to family work, where snapshots become blueprints for re-posed scenes. My images are similarly staged, with elements manipulated to feign reality, exposing the artifice while questioning the gaze. Diane Arbus once said, “I arrange myself, not my subject,” a sentiment that guided my process as I sought to reveal my mother’s performance by imitating it. The dynamic between her self-representation and my own choices in representing her suggests, as Solomon-Godeau writes, that “there is no real outside of representation.” My work engaged with the uncanny, recalling Sarah Jones’ photographs of subjects in estranged domestic interiors, and Freud’s The Uncanny, as I came to know my mother in a different light. The masks we wore—mine and hers—melted into the fabric of our interaction, echoing Wilde’s observation that the truth of a mask lies in its surface.

Ultimately, this project is neither a portrait of myself nor my mother, but rather a depiction of our exchange. Between photographer and subject, there is always a compromise between intention and chance. We are not fully in control of the script. My intentions define the image, while my mother’s impressions reveal her own resurrected identity. As Susan Sontag noted, photographs, “like death masks,” reveal no soul. The truth, perhaps, lies not in the depths we seek, but on the surface—in the choices made, like the frame itself, where intention resides. It is not about stripping away the mask to find the “real you,” but rather recognizing that the surface is where truth lives, waiting to be seen.

Suzanne Méjean Pinney