“I must therefore submit to this law: I cannot penetrate, cannot reach into the Photograph. I can only sweep it with my glance, like a smooth surface. The Photograph is flat, platitudinous in the true sense of the word, that is what I must acknowledge. It is a mistake to associate Photography … with the notion of a dark passage (camera obscura). It is a camera lucida that we should say, … for the essence of the image is to be altogether outside, without intimacy.” (Roland Barthes)


“A suggestion of the invisible in the visible, of the intimacy of a figure simultaneously close and inaccessible, … the mystery of what is present, but not visible. … Vermeer’s paintings are constructed in such a way as to present … life equally present and inaccessible, near and impenetrable.” (Daniel Arasse)


“It is no accident that the most beautiful photograph so far achieved is possibly the first image Nicéphore Niepce fixed in 1822, on the glass of the camera obscura -- a fragile, threatened image so close in its organization, its granular texture, and its emergent aspect, to certain Seurats -- an incomparable image which makes one dream of photographic substance distinct from subject matter, and of an art in which light creates its own metaphor.” (Hubert Damisch)


“The weight of the non-said (non-dit) no doubt affects the mother’s body first of all: no signifier can cover it completely, for the signifier is always meaning (sens), communication or structure, whereas a mother-woman is rather a strange fold (pli) which turns nature into culture; and the speaking subject (le parlant) into biology.” (Julia Kristeva)


“By making us aware of signifying complexities that can sometimes be operative in the visual arts, iconology has, so to speak, deflowered the image. How could anyone complain about that?” (Georges Didier-Huberman)


“I learned to struggle with the canvas, to recognize it as an entity opposed to my wishes … and to force it to submit to these visions. At first, it stands there like a pure, chaste maiden, with clear gaze and heavenly joy -- this pure canvas that is itself as beautiful as a picture. And then comes the imperious brush, conquering gradually, first here, then there, employing all its native energy, like a European colonist who with ax, spade, hammer, saw penetrates the virgin jungle where no human foot has trod, bending it to conform to his will.”(Wassily Kandinsky)


TRANSFERENCE
“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.“ (John Berger, Ways of Seeing) Why, then, “is it so hard for us to believe that our truths are often fantasies?” (Amy Blum, Normal) Perhaps because we have learned to believe in the Truth of science.
As a scholar I am in a peculiar position: the tools of academic reasoning and scientific exploration are embedded in a culture of surveillance. How can I understand the meaning of the visual in my own culture when scholarly discourse forces me to occupy the position of the gaze, the voyeur? Distant, objective, always on the outside. Pretending to be foreigner, and armed with theory, I am expected to present ‘penetrating arguments.’ -- Do I always have to play by the rules?

Leap of faith. In a letter Paul the apostle teaches the Corinthians:

“A man should not have his head covered, since he is the image and glory of God. But the woman is the glory of the man. For man did not come from woman, but woman from man.“ (1 Corinthians, 11:7)

To anyone with eyes to see Paul’s words don’t make sense. Not then. Obviously man is of woman born. So is woman. The pronouncement that woman comes from man disregards the obvious in favor of an understanding of masculine and feminine fertility that is at odds with the visible world. As symbol of this new vision of men and women, the veil contradicts what we think of as nature.

The Christian veil symbolizes a new relation between man & woman, masculinity & femininity. Woman is a copy to man’s original. He has depth, she is flat. He is the beginning, she is history. Man is created in the image of God, woman is man’s glory. Glory appeals to the sense of sight. It implies the perception of “an unearthly beauty attributed by imagination.” (OED) Woman’s appearance conceived in man’s mind. The Christian virgin as primal screen -- untouched, passive, flat.

Non-sequitur. The modern unveiling of western women does not break away from the christian doctrine of woman as the image of man. It is its fulfillment. The fabrication of a naked veil. Invisible, untouchable, hard to prove. But this is not to say it doesn’t exist.


VERUSCHKA
Where do images come from?
Let’s assume the words I use are mine.

A revelation: Veruschka at the window. Underneath a black leather coat, loosely girded above the navel, her pale, silky skin is glowing from within, in stark contrast to the darkness surrounding her. I look at her blank face. Is she looking at me? Does she see me? It doesn’t matter because all Veruschka cares about is to be looked at. Why else would she put herself on display? (Does she put herself on display?) Pulling back a white curtain, she offers her body as spectacle. There is something almost brutal about this unveiling. The blood red fingernails piercing the fragile folds of the white curtain.

In a black-and-white photograph blood is black. For Homer blood was black too. When did blood become red?

Veruschka’s left hand covers her private parts. But a small triangle of pubic hair is left unprotected. Am I witness to a defloration? Isn’t defloration, in Western culture, the most private act of taking possession of a woman, of turning her into property, private property? But if indeed a defloration has occurred, the image seems to want to mend what has been ruptured. The photograph is flat, without depth. It denies penetration and offers something far more delightful: the pleasures of the surface. My glance is invited to dwell on the photograph’s delicate & seductive surfaces: skin as smooth as silk, window panes seamlessly blending into curtains whose folds echo the gentle waves of the Mediterranean. Everything in and about this photograph speaks of the fragility of screens. Veruschka herself is no exception. Her body a surface among surfaces, a variation of the many feminine screens/veils/folds that appear to be the true subject of this photograph.

Veruschka lets me in on 'the secret’ of photography. Every photograph, she intimates, possesses an imaginary hymen, enticing, unbreakable. "Where do babies come from?" "Where do I come from?" The sight of Veruschka banishes these questions from thought. Veruschka assures me that like a photograph a female body is all surface and no content.

Veruschka was shot at the French riviera: a la mer/la mère, at the sea/the mother -- flat.

Photography, primal screen.


MADONNA DEL PARTO
Where does Veruschka come from?
Let's assume the things I see are for real.

From the French Riviera to a small village in Tuscany.

In the tiny museum of Monterchi there is a marvelous fresco of the Madonna del Parto (the Virgin of Parturition) that bears a striking resemblance to Veruschka. The fresco was created by Piero della Francesca in the second half of the fifteenth century for the medieval chapel opposite the museum. A revelation yet again. Two angels holding up a curtain, as if on a stage, presenting the pregnant Virgin. She too, despite her pregnancy, seems flat, more exterior than interior; she too a praise of surfaces; she too, situated in a space that has no depth but many folds. One fold seems particularly precious, in need of both protection and attention. The fingers of the Madonna’s left hand hover over a long slit in her pleated, many-layered garment, exposing a layer of fine fabric, exquisite in its whiteness. Her unspoiled hymen!

Where Veruschka comments on the art of photography, the Madonna is a comment on the art of painting. Piero succeeded in depicting the impossible: a voluminous body that denies depth, a Virgin whose pregnancy is flat and yet seems perfectly natural. The Madonna del Parto stands out among the numerous medieval Madonnas situated in a symbolic space removed from the physical reality of the spectator. Piero’s Madonna is of my world. Her space could be my space.

Now I understand. Only at first glance does the fresco illustrate the miracle of the pregnant virgin. What it really celebrates is the art (and technology) of representing virginity as receptive, ‘pregnant’ surface, ready to conceive a new world view.

In the early 1990s the Madonna was detached from her original ground and moved to the museum where she was put behind glass in a specially designed, climate-controlled exhibition case, like a photograph. Since her ‘detachment’ from the original ground in the chapel, flatness has become the Madonna’s defining and most anxiously guarded quality.

The Madonna del Parto, guardian of the primal screen.


STILL LIFE
How does one fabricate a primal screen?
Let’s assume I was an apprentice.

Florence. While Piero della Francesca was working at the Madonna, Leon Battista Alberti introduced a new technology for viewing and representing the visible world, known as linear perspective. To achieve the projection of three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional plane Alberti devised a viewing grid -- “a thin veil, finely woven” -- he called “Velum,” Latin for hymen. Perspectival images are produced with the hymen in mind.

Alberti: “This veil I place between the eye and the thing seen, so the [the gaze] penetrates through the thinness of the veil. This veil can be of great use to you.”


It’s Dürer who teaches me how great exactly.

Nuremberg. A woodcut in Albrecht Dürer’s manual Underweysung der Messung (The Four Books on Measurement) leaves no doubt that images such as Veruschka and the Madonna del Parto spring from the mind. They are demonstrations of the artist’s technical skills, his intellectual powers, his new vision of the world derived from a theory of representation and subjectivity that announced the era of European colonization.

The study of an artist, a man of science. Clean, measured, earnest. A woman poses for him, naked. He is as alert and vertical as she is unconscious and horizontal. She, a reclining nude; he, an upright observer. She’s as vulnerable to his gaze as he’s secure in the knowledge that she won’t dare to return the gaze.

In his world to be looked at means to be feminized, to be put in what was thought of as a woman’s position. He looks, she appears; his look makes her appear. Rarely the other way round. There is a sexual element too. Within this strictly segregated world view, in which desire and creativity are imagined to flow in one direction only, sexuality is visualized and vision is sexualized.

The Velum keeps them segregated.

Everything on her side of the Velum bespeaks indulgence. The softness of the cushions on which she rests her head, the lasciviousness of her pose, the firmness of her naked breasts, the pleasant curves of the landscape echoing the shapes of her body. Like Veruschka and the Madonna her left hand draws me to her pudendum.

There’s indulgence on his side too, but of a different kind. What excites him is stillness. He realizes that for living beings stillness means death. He also knows that seeing isn’t still. That’s why he doesn’t see. He looks. Looks with just one eye. If only he could muster enough will power to avoid blinking. Besides opening and shutting his eyes, the only other motion he allows himself is his right hand tracing on a sheet of paper placed in front of him the contours of the female body on the other side of the Velum. Don’t move, he admonishes his model.

With the help of the Velum he achieves the stillness he so desires. The Velum enables him to stay put, focused. In his imagination he is separated from the world surrounding him, from the female body he could have been born of. The Velum renders him invisible. He is a voyeur. His stare is a weapon. It can kill.

The Latin word velum corresponds to the Greek hymen (‘curtain’, ‘veil’, ‘piece of skin’), which in the 12th-century was adopted to refer to the maidenhead. Is this what our artist has in mind?

Making an image consist of a particular mental operation: using the Velum as imaginary primer. If he succeeds, his image will appeal to the spectator as does the idea of a hymen that remains inviolate to touch. Such is the excitement of a painter.

What was new and exciting for him, has become second nature to us. Alberti was right to assume that, as the number of images increases, we would become spectators who repeat and internalize the gaze of image maker. For me the perspectival world view looks perfectly natural.

Perspective transformed the visual image into a screen of possibilities on which “the reality of what we are disappears into the possibility of what we could be.”
Ann Carson calls this space where actual and possible meet a blind point, perspectival theory calls it vanishing point. I call it primal screen.



THREE WOMEN
How did the primal screen enter art history?
Let’s assume I was an expert.

Among Baroque painters Johannes Vermeer is the undisputed master of the primal screen. His paintings are famous for creating a semblance of seamlessness, an impression of inviolable privacy. In his painting Vermeer banishes the notion of rupture, forbids the intrusion of an unwanted reality. What I admire most in Vermeer’s art is its evocation of the hymen, intact.

Vermeer’s painting is blurred. Edges and borders are rare. The OED defines blurred as ‘stained,’ ‘sullied,’ ‘befouled.’ Something tells me Vermeer is more complex than that.

Consider for example A Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window, painted around 1657.

The elegant folds of a yellowish curtain, drawn back on a rail, bathed in light the texture of milk. Draped on a table just behind the curtain a rich oriental rug. Its thick folds breaking on the wall like waves on a cliff. A young woman, some say she’s a girl, dressed in fine garment is standing in front of an open window, absorbed in a white sheet of paper she is holding gently between the fingers of her hands. A letter? The title of the painting, A Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window, wants me to believe precisely this. But there’s nothing written on the glowing piece of paper in her hands.

The young woman is presented to me in profile. Her face -- attentive, composed, even-minded -- is as unreadable as the sheet in her hands. What is she thinking? What are her feelings? I don’t know. I don’t want to know. What draws me to this painting is its air of imperturbability. Nothing can disturb the privacy of this intimate moment. The paintings appealing surfaces further emphasize the impression of an intimacy that can’t be violated. The softness of the oriental carpet; the silky smoothness of the wall; the creamy brightness of the light from the window that doesn’t offer a view; the almost weightless density of the blank sheet between the woman’s fingers.

If it is indeed a letter she is reading, it announces nothing less than an exquisite superficiality. The paper, floating like fine cloth over the woman’s loins, re-calls the Madonna del Parto’s unblemished hymen.

Piero della Francesca foregrounds religious orthodoxy, the pregnant Madonna does not permit to doubt the divine nature of her virginity. Vermeer shows the primal screen as fabricated. Where Piero denies memory, Vermeer preserves traces of the past.

The Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window is not alone. There’s a ghost in the room. Behind the leaded window frame pushed towards the wall -- impossible not to recall Alberti’s velum -- I detect the fleeting reflection of the woman’s face at a slightly different angle. Reflection is the wrong word, for the face appears behind the glass. A doppelgänger. Blurred, uncanny. Like a stream falling from the ceiling, a red curtain spills over the window frame towards the ghostly face. The specter of the torn hymen contained behind Alberti’s grid. Now I understand why the Girl Reading a Letter by an Window seems unperturbed. Protected by the velum she has nothing to fear.

Even submitting the painting to an X-ray examination has not succeeded in violating its privacy. As if Vermeer anticipated modern technology, he hid a glass carafe under the curtain. I cannot disturb the woman’s solitude -- unless I destroy the painting.


Sometimes works of art watch out for one another. In my mind Vermeer’s The Lacemaker, his smallest work painted between 1669 and 1671, makes sure the privacy of the Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window will always be protected.

The Lacemaker at her desk, bending over her needlework with the greatest concentration. Her face is relaxed, her eye lids drooping. Is she sleeping? Dreaming, perhaps?

Like the Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window the Lacemaker who is unawares of my watching her, remains undisturbed by my gaze. I’m not intruding upon her. Vermeer does not allow me to see what she is making. She sees more than I do. From my perspective most of the painting is blurred. The Lacemaker’s fingers -- gentle, tender, precise -- are holding two bobbins each furnishing a thread of exquisite thinness. These two threads, white and crisp, are the painting’s sole sharp focus.

(Enter Freud) “It seems that women have made few contributions to the discoveries and inventions in the history of civilization; there is, however, one technique which they may have invented -- that of plaiting and weaving. Nature herself would seem to have given the model which this achievement imitates by causing the growth at maturity of the pubic hair that conceals the genitals. The step that remained to be taken lay in making the threads adhere to one another, while on the body they stick into the skin and are only matted together.”

Making lace, this “fine web which feeds the pride of the whole globe” -- a symptom of penis envy? I’m not convinced Vermeer shares Freud’s view. Let’s take a look at the prominent blue naaikussen (sewing cushion) in the foreground from which are gushing streams of red and white thread. Blood and milk? Sperm? Menstruation, defloration, birth? It doesn’t happen often that a painting invites the spectator’s associations to return to the bleeding womb. Under normal circumstances a lacemaker would place the naaikussen -- her work box -- on her lap so that she could easily reach for needles and thread. But in Vermeer’s painting the cushion is put on display, begging for my attention.

(Re-enter Freud) “We should be tempted to guess the unconscious motive … all the threads of the analysis have led up to it, castration might be more than an empty threat.”

Listen Sigmund, Vermeer’s art is not cruel. Even though he imagines a memory of your origin, he doesn’t mean to frighten you. This is The Lacemaker’s promise: there will be veils and screens, there will be imaginary hymens, always. The Lacemaker’s precise vision & skilled fingers, “making the threads adhere to one another” -- a metaphor for the painter’s craft to cloak what is regarded as stained, sullied, befouled.
Vermeer knew of the pleasures of blurredness. The Oxford English Dictionary has yet to catch up with the master of the primal screen.

The Lacemaker, measuring only 24 x 21 cm, is smaller than Veruschka.
Vermeer was a perfectionist.


FATIGUE
Can you feel the aggression?
I don’t feel aggression. I feel envy.


When I shoot a photograph, I interrupt the continuity of visual experience. When I shoot at a photograph (or a mirror), I interrupt the illusion of depth. If you don’t believe me, take a look at André Kertész’s Broken Plate.


“In this picture of Montmartre, I was just testing a new lens for a special effect. When I went to America, I left most of my material in Paris, and when I returned, I found sixty percent of the glass-plate negatives were broken. This one I saved, but it had a hole in it. I printed it anyway. An accident helped me produce a beautiful effect.” (André Kertész)


If I were to describe the meaning of this beautiful effect, I’d say it contains a truth about the nature of photography. Contrary to a widespread wishful fantasy, shared by both image makers & spectators, a visual image cannot be deflowered. Piercing a picture’s surface does not allow me to enter into virgin territory; detecting a wound -- a punctum -- in an image (as Roland Barthes did) may destroy its coherence, but it doesn’t mean there will be blood. In a visual image penetration produces a blind spot. Nothing more and nothing less. Such is the curse of the primal screen. And such is the art of André Kertesz’s photograph.

Defloration envy: The wish to possess, to have at my disposal, a safe and secret interior protected by a fragile and yet renewable membrane. The desire for never-ending defloration. If woman can be deflowered, why doesn’t the visual image allow defloration?

There’s penetration and there is separation. And then there’s fatiguing, the passion of John Sparagana.

From magazines known for the superb quality of paper and fashion photography (such as Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Cosmopolitan) Sparagana tears out fashion advertisements. He then carefully rubs the pages between his fingers -- Sparagana calls this activity “fatiguing” -- until the pages lose their sheen and most of their substance. What remains resembles a translucent and elastic spider web behind which the image seems to have receded. Fatiguing separates what is normally thought to be inseparable in a visual image: the re-presentation of an appearance and the material support (panel, canvas, glass, paper) on which it is re-presented.

The effect this surface treatment produces is uncanny: the photographic paper supposed to receive the image seems to veil it, hide it from my view. The Fatigues evoke a space set apart, secluded. Inside/outside. A sanctuary in which what is private and secret finds refuge. Looking at the Fatigues the gaze, this great colonizer, reassures itself: there will always be secrets; the world is not (yet) flat. By rubbing away the sheen Sparagana not only adds a sense of mystery to the superficiality of fashion photography and its obsession with appearance, he also creates marvelous ruins that evoke the beginnings of photography, an era when the perfection of the primal screen left much to be desired.

Penetration was yesterday, fatigue is now!


POST-PARTUM
The primal screen is a Christian fantasma. I must be careful not to impose it onto cultures which have incorporated their own religious beliefs, and which have developed ideas of the nature of woman as well as the function of visual images different from mine.

The Christian veil marks the beginning of the history of the primal screen. A history that is not over yet.

“Men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at.” (John Berger, Ways of Seeing) The wish to see her naked -- not as she would see herself but as he wants to see her. Nude. The convention of the female nude, unique to European art, presents a form of nakedness that reduces the lived diversity of women’s bodies to an idealized surface, a screen. The nude wears her nudity like a garment. A naked veil. A sight to be looked at by others and by herself. The female nude is never a mother.

The saturation of public spaces with images of the nude affect me. I begin to imitate the image. I have shed the veil long ago. Over the centuries layer after layer of clothing disappears. When in the 1960s the bikini becomes an acceptable form of dress, I have mastered the art of likening myself to the image of the nude. I rarely talk about this part of my history when I revile the Muslim woman’s veil.

Much pleasure & satisfaction can be found in turning myself into a sight. It makes me feel free, even powerful, in control. But this should not lead me to conclude that the veiled Muslim woman lacks the freedom to experience pleasure . It’s true, her pleasures are different from mine. It is that difference I perceive as a provocation to my hard-won freedom.

The veiled Muslim woman does not pretend she’s flat. There is a female body underneath the Muslim veil. A sexual body. It is this body I’m obsessed with, want to drag into the open, expose, defile. This is my wish: to reduce her to an image, a screen. Why? Because her presence forces me to acknowledge that not only am I less secular than I pretend to be, I am also not as free and liberated as I want to be.

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IMAGES

1. Helmut Newton, Veruschka (Nice 1975), gelatin silver print, Private Property Suite 2, 24,1x36,2 cm.

2. Piero della Francesca, La Madonna del Parto, fresco 1467, Monterchi, Museo Monterchi, Tuscany.

3. Albrecht Dürer, woodcut from Underweysung der Messung, 2nd edition, Nürnberg 1538.

4. Johannes Vermeer, A Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window, c. 1657, oil on canvas, 83 x 64.5 cm., Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.

5. Johannes Vermeer, The Lacemaker, c.1669-1671, oil on canvas, 24.5 x 21 cm. (9 5/8 x 8 1/4 in.), The Louvre, Paris.

6. André Kertesz, Broken Plate, 1929, Paris, from a portfolio "Photographs Andre Kertesz vol. I, 1929, gelatin silver photograph, printed image 19.3 x 24.4 cm.

7. John Sparagana, Sleeping Beauty, paper, sampled and fatigued, 2004.