AMY BASSIN: FAMILIAL GHOSTS
Queering the Photograph
by Michael Gormley
Amy Bassin queers photography. Her current project, Familial Ghosts, comprises a series of altered images derived from an inherited slide collection documenting decades of childhood vacations, outings, and parties with her family. Choosing slides randomly, Bassin alters the image using wax, ink, and cleaning products before digitally reconstituting the photographic print.
Christoph Ribbat in their essay Queer and Straight Photography, notes that "straight" served as the central concept of camera work between the 1920s and the 1960s; the term denoted modernist photographic practices that produced pure, unretouched images as represented by artists such as Paul Strand and Edward Weston. Their exemplary practices privileged detached observation and technical proficiency. Efforts to retouch or accentuate the photographic print were deemed taboo as these interventions betrayed an emotional attachment or an overtly romantic and hence “unnatural” tendency. “Blind Woman” by Strand models Ribbat’s “masculine” photography; the individual behind the camera, assumed to be a male, is unemotional, fully in control, and laboring within proscribed boundaries to produce an art form that rises above personal emotions to produce unsparing imagery and in some instances, the pitiless documentation offered by “Blind Woman”.
In a strict literal sense, “queering” means to disrupt or undermine, hence "queering straight photography" implies a steadfast effort to scuttle the hard, technically proficient, and cold rhetoric of the “straight” photography which is doubly invisible (to the subject and to the viewer) and does not reveal emotions. Revealing emotive content and what lies beyond the visible are Bassin’s main objectives. She notes. “Having a background in abstract painting and drawing I strive to find fresh introspection beyond the representation of a captured reality, and this exposes the fraught relationships between outward appearance, inner life, and time.”
Paul Strand, “Blind Woman”, New York, 1916, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
My Process
cut, tear, hammer, collage, glue.
scream, ream, dream.
fry, cry, sigh and fly.
bead, read.
shrink, drink, wink, think.
see, be.
claw, thaw, straw, draw.
saint, taint, paint.
pray, play.
run, fun, done.
Amy Bassin
Amy Bassin, Familial Ghosts # 3, 2021, archival inkjet print 15 x 22 in.
In keeping with the experimental focus of Knight Lawrence Web Projects, Bassin is still in the early stages of the Familial Ghosts series. Chance, and allowing random materiality effects, remains at the heart of the project. Both reference classic surrealist techniques meant to reveal unconscious associations and incite altered states of awareness. Bassin adds, “Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup is the first work of art that I remember having the most impact on me as a teenager. I was inspired by her bizarre combination of found objects that seemed to challenge all reason with the unexpected subconscious and poetic associations in the work. The concept of transforming found, every day, familiar objects has been a reoccurring theme in my work.”
For those old enough to remember, Familial Ghosts # 3 recalls the ghost -like and somewhat scary silhouetted figures and scenes burned out in the negatives that came with processed film. Equally haunting, Familial Ghosts # 3 recalls Gerhard Richter’s ghosting---a record of who is missing.
Familial Ghosts # 7 depicts a formal park of a known style and majesty⎯perhaps Versailles or the Tulleries. The altered surface recalls views seen from behind a rain-streaked window; we can hear the beginning batter, and tingle with the sublime anticipation of a coming summer thunderstorm. The image is part of a nine-piece ensemble labeled the “blue series”. Two similar series precedes this one; they likewise comprise nine altered images and titled by a primary color: yellow and red. The primary triad offers an elemental grounding to the work and creates a tension between the original captured imagery and subsequent manipulations. At times the prismatic alterations appear to echo or amplify the recognizable figurative, landscape and architectural forms resulting in a heightened narrative. In other instances the preexisting imagery is all but obliterated –an act that poses as aesthetic choice but actually betrays subconscious context.
Amy Bassin, Familial Ghosts # 7, 2021, archival inkjet print 15 x 22 in.
This push/pull effect between what is foregrounded and what is hidden is further heightened by the arrangement of the works into grids which, rather than impose order, disrupt any narrative the viewer may attempt to impose with an unsettling sense of randomness and fragmentation. But ironically, hasn’t Bassin presented a stunningly sublime suggestion of memory, and by extension photography, as an untrustworthy witness plagued by mercurial whims and willfully dismissive of the facts?
Knight Lawrence Web Projects is a web-based experimental space privileging new, and in-progress works by New York Artists Equity (NYAE) members. Projects are posted for six-week terms and all works are offered for sale through NYAE’s online marketplace. NYAE visual art programs support emerging and underrecognized practitioners from underserved communities and are funded in part by the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Amy Bassin, Familial Ghosts # 8, 2021, archival inkjet print 15 x 22 in.