Favorite Photo Reviews 10: Janet Malcolm's "The View from Plato's Cave"

Herta Hilscher-Wittgenstein, Toni, October, 1975

I love photography reviews – their comparison of images, exploration of detail, illumination of style, formulation of theory. When done right, they’re an excellent source of descriptive analysis, a form of writing I devour. Over the next few weeks, I’ll list ten of my favorite pieces and try to say why I like them. Today, I’ll start with #10:  Janet Malcolm’s brilliant “The View from Plato’s Cave” (The New Yorker, October 18, 1976; included in her great 1980 collection Diana & Nikon).

It's a review of a 1976 exhibition of photos by Nina Alexander and Herta Hilscher-Wittgenstein, at Susan Caldwell Gallery, in Soho. The pictures are of a terminally ill thirty-nine-year-old woman taken during the last months of her life and after her death. The piece is memorable for Malcolm’s bravura description of one of Hilscher-Wittgenstein’s pictures, titled Toni, October (1975):

The enormously enlarged photograph of the incision-slashed torso was the pivotal image of the show; it compelled immediate, stunned attention, and its presence invaded one’s perception of the other, less overtly horrifying images. Its horror comes from the fact that it is not a clinical study of a body on an operating table, or a medical-textbook illustration showing a person enduring photography as he does treatment, but a picture of a beautiful young woman posed in a graceful, even slightly vain attitude. She has put a silver necklace around her neck and a bracelet on one wrist. (The other wrist is encircled by a plastic hospital tag.) Her body has the delicate slenderness of a boy’s, and the photograph subtly evokes Edward Weston’s lovely study of his son Neil’s nude torso—it is similarly cropped at the neck and the pubes. The two savage arcs of messy black surgical stitches that rip into the right breast and tear down the abdomen are like obscene marks made on a statue by a vandal. The tense clash of imagery—the brutal yoking of the emblems of pain, pathology, mutilation, and inanition with the attributes of health, wholeness, volition, and grace—is paralleled by a conflict of feeling within the viewer, who is both repelled by and drawn to the image: appalled by the way the woman is exposing what it is “normal” to keep out of sight, and yet fascinated by the details thereby revealed. And, oddly, the closer the viewer looks at the incisions, the less distress he feels; finally, his repugnance recedes and is replaced by something akin to awe for the work of the anonymous surgeon, for the neat and clean way the body has been closed, for the small outward signs of damage.

Malcolm’s analysis of Toni, October is equally compelling. She writes,

The transfixing specificity of this image was present in no other work in the show; the other selections moved the viewer not by what they showed but because of what he had been told about the subject’s tragic situation. For there is nothing in the picture of the woman’s face during a spasm of pain to show that she is afflicted with cancer rather than with menstrual cramps, or in the picture of the embrace with her daughter to indicate that she is going to die rather than leave for a holiday, or even in the pictures of the corpse to make one see that this is real rather than a piece of theatre. The picture story presented here, like those in Life and Look, requires extra-photographic information by which to convey its meaning; without the introductory message, the pictures make little impression or sense. Only the photograph of the torso illustrates its own meaning, requires no explanation, has no ambiguity, can be nothing but what it manifestly appears to be.

I first read this piece forty-seven years ago when it appeared in The New Yorker. That “transfixing specificity” has stayed with me ever since. It’s one of my prime criteria for identifying great art.