Sarah Anne Johnson and the Public Lives of Private Images

by Alison Cooley

“…Her hair and his beard are hopelessly tangled. When he puts his mouth against her shoulder she is uncertain whether her shoulder has given or received the kiss…”

— Leonard Cohen, “We Have the Lovers” (1961)

Who are Sarah Anne Johnson’s images for? When Winnipeg photographer Sarah Anne Johnson’s most recent Toronto exhibition, “Wonderlust,” opened in the spring of 2014, she stated that her goal was to “explore the internal world of sexual intimacy. To show what it looks and feels like.” Johnson promised an exhibition of something private—personal, vulnerable, risky—an ambitious attempt to transmit a sense of this tenderness through the media of the photograph.

I had first encountered an image from the “Wonderlust” series at Art Toronto in the fall of 2013, and was immediately captivated. I considered the photograph a tonic to the buzzy, art-worldy messiness of the fair. Johnson’s Red Undies, 2013, seemed to offer a separate kind of frenzy from the hawk-eyed posturing of art world see-and-be-seen: the frenzy of two lovers, hands and mouths quickening and slowing across each others’ skin. The manipulated photograph reveals a softly day-lit tessellation that unrules itself and the logic of its own construction. Geometric panels of hair and flesh abandon a central cluster and drift wayward. In the bottom of the frame, untouched by Johnson’s alterations, a woman’s pale legs, clad in red panties, straddle her partner. His figure distorted by Johnson’s collage intrusions, he sucks and kisses and conjures by the absence of his face—by the absence of eye or nipple or identifying earlobe—some act between sweetness and voraciousness.

Against my better judgment, I found myself returning to Leonard Cohen’s “We Have the Lovers,” enrapt with the frantic lovers ceasing to distinguish between self and other. Caught in each others’ pleasure, they become stuck in time. While there is a frenzy in the couple’s embrace, there is also the sense that the encounter, filled with the tiny actions of bodies upon each other, has been thrown into the air and is simply caught there for a delirious moment.

It is hard not to read images like these as deeply personal. They carry with them an affective and provocative weight, even in the mischievousness of the alterations Johnson has made to her documentation of these strangers’ sex lives. And because Red Undies asked to be sincerely felt, it seemed natural to assign it a therapeutic function as a warm, forgiving, feel-good affirmation of human sexuality; an offering. But photographs such as Red Undies, or the similarly patchworked Puzzle Pieces, 2013,—elegant painstaking manifestations of a kind of sexual sublime—are by no means representative of the entirety of Johnson’s series. Other works in “Wonderlust” betray an aggressive edge, or a note of cartoonish playfulness. Though an attentiveness to the smaller acts that constitute sex by their combination carries throughout, Johnson’s modifications are nuanced, impish, sometimes inexact.

Throughout Johnson’s career, her practice has hinged on obscuring and manipulating the human figure, imbuing it with a sort of psychological formalism. The Winnipeg artist has abandoned straight photography, admitting, even, that she is “bored” with the idea. “I don’t think you can take a straight picture anymore,” she says. “There are limitations to what it can show; it’s great at showing the surface of something, but it lacks trying to show what lies beneath the surface.”((Telephone interview with Sarah Anne Johnson, September 17th, 2014.)) Instead, she paints, sculpts, incises and collages her way back into the image, clawing for a shade of the experiential and participatory practice of putting a photograph together.

The earliest work for which she received widespread recognition, “Tree Planting Project,” 2005, had begun to reveal this method. Revisiting her experiences as a tree-planter in Northern Manitoba, the artist intermixed documentary images of tree-planters at work with photographs of dioramas and figurines created in her studio. The resulting series envisioned both the magic and drudgery of her seasonal labour and its corresponding community. More recently, the artist has distanced herself from even the most abstract and opaque of straight photography. In her 2009 exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Johnson fabricated a dollhouse that she then photographed. This series of works, “House on Fire,” refers to Johnson’s Grandmother’s experience as a victim of a set of non-consensual and undisclosed CIA experiments conducted while she was a patient at Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University, in the 1950s, and to the emotional and psychological fallout of this trauma on her subsequent family life.

In “House on Fire,” Johnson conjures a dollhouse of the uncanny: heaps of paper accumulate and overwhelm; ice, snow, swamp water and unruly tree branches impinge upon the home’s structures; hallways are sparse; human figurines appear stuck. It’s no stretch to see the metaphorical mental unwinding inside, and to see her dolls and their environments as prototypical Freudian manifestations of the uncanny.

In Johnson’s photographs, persistent uncanniness belies a kind of crooked despair with the “straight” photograph. During her 2009 research cruise through the Arctic, Johnson described a hopeless confluence of documentary images. Having traveled with a group comprised mostly of photographers, she remarked, “We all had the same pictures. Everyone was experiencing the same thing, with slight variations.” Resisting the impulse to glorify the arctic landscape, she chose instead to foreground the perceived evidence of climate change, populating her prints with strange dystopian structures, dark clouds, fireworks, the refuse of parties entirely invasive and out of place. Revisiting the photographs in the studio, Johnson’s manipulations became necessary, both to distinguish her work from documentary photographs and to reflect something of the unseen anxiety of the landscape.

Johnson describes her return from the arctic as a productive struggle. After working into her scenic and expansive photographs, she chose to withdraw from the cold, shifting from awe with the landscape and its collapse to a curiosity about human encounters. “Somehow making work about intimacy and getting close to people in their most intimate moments just made sense to me,” she says.

Despite the warmth of her new subject matter in “Wonderlust,” some of the images reveal a certain roughness. In Scratches, 2013, for example, Johnson has cut into the photograph, slicing away thin fragments of the image and pulling off more sizable chunks in rough, directional lacerations. The radiating scrapes frame a couple, one partner’s back to the viewer and the other’s body almost obscured, but for the legs. The stark contrast of the white incisions against the dark blue bedspread immediately draws the eye inward toward a set of scratches across the subjects back, evidencing the ecstatic scrapes of long, sharp nails. Johnson’s mirroring of scratches in Scratches is perhaps an obvious kind of intervention; a magnification of the existing content of the photograph. But at another level, the manipulation is a slow guidance. The incisions are both formally useful and beautifully precise. Even in their seeming crudeness, they overwhelm the image, drawing the eye to the man’s scratched back as a kind of final disclosure.

Johnson’s sense of the uncanny also permeates the series in unsettling ways that break much of the beauty of the other photographs. In Happy Face, 2013, and Long Arms, 2013, Johnson extends the tone of her subjects’ skin, cartoonishly distorting their bodies. In Happy Face, a pair of lovers’ heads are eclipsed by the semitransparent screen of a face more closely resembling the Walmart smiley than any human figure. The immediate effect is repulsive and ridiculous, but it also flips back and forth in an optical illusion: the couple’s intertwined bodies become one monstrous figure, or the justbarely- obscured faces prompt a voyeuristic impulse to identify them, as if looking for someone we know. In Splatter Paint, 2013, a splash of colour centred over a photograph of a woman, her back to us, fellating her partner, acts as a one-liner: an exaggerated ejaculation. Johnson makes sex strange, sometimes laughable. She draws out our insecurity and immaturity.

When she first began photographing strangers’ intimate moments for “Wonderlust,” Johnson had bold ideas of what she would do to their images. “I had a list of ideas of manipulations,” she says, “I told them, ‘I could put a donkey head on you.’ I thought I would walk in and take pictures, and they wouldn’t affect me at all. It did not work that way of course, because I would spend two hours with a couple. It’s so brave and generous of them to let me in… They were surrogates for myself and my own issues and my own past relationships.” Here, Johnson’s photographic manipulations are in danger of falling into the fraught territory of therapy. A surface reading of the series logs them as simply another example of her search for the affective truth of the image—an effort to convey her encounter with a couple in emotional and biographical terms. But to consider the photographs only as the artist’s attempt to grasp for experiential accuracy is to evacuate them of their politics, to rewrite them as therapeutic exercises.

This is not to say Johnson’s images do not serve a therapeutic purpose; earlier I wrote about the reparative sweetness of these images, their sincere expression of desire and intimacy, in contrast to the instrumentalized consumer desire of the art fair atmosphere. But to ignore a deeper politics in these images is to slip into the comfortable and dangerous trend which often prevails in discussions of women’s work: to assume that because they serve a personal function they do not serve any other.

In some senses, Johnson’s politics seem more transparent in series such as “Tree Planting Project,” “The Galapagos Project,” 2005, and “Arctic Wonderland,” 2011, each of which holds an ecological community at its centre. Each of those projects also contends with the nature of curiosity, discovery, and belonging; what it means that a camera is allowed to be witness, and how its presence might impact the actions it documents. “I felt like more of an intruder in the arctic than I did in the “Wonderlust” series,” Johnson says. “I felt like, if I’m here, right now, on this boat tour, then this place is already fucked.” In the arctic, Johnson’s very being-there was a transgression, and her subsequent interventions into the photographs confront the artist’s responsibility to the landscape she’s witnessed. But in “Wonderlust,” Johnson confronts her responsibility to the couple she photographs the moment she enters an interaction with them. The photographer and subject negotiate and respond to each other as their encounter unfolds. Johnson performs “Wonderlust” before she even begins to photograph the series.

As a response to the intrusive nature of photographic couples’ intimate moments, Johnson developed a contract, which she presented to her subjects as she prepared to photograph them. She asked them to specify which modifications could and couldn’t be made to their images, what Johnson was permitted and not permitted to show. More than visualizing her subjects’ consenting relations with each other, she formalized her participants’ consent, formalized her presence, the camera’s presence. This framework is deeply collaborative, deeply consensual. Despite Johnson’s place outside, her so-called intrusion in the sexual act, she becomes party to the experience. She enters, in these images, into a stewardship of her subjects—not an environmental stewardship, as in her previous works, but a stewardship of each other.

Johnson’s relationship with her subjects, although sometimes directorial (often presenting manipulations, beautifications, monstrosifications to their bodies) is not the relationship between pornographer and performer. It does not hinge on revealing the salacious details of their coupling. Nor is it the standard artist-model relationship. Johnson’s subjects are not muses. Rather, they are collaborators in an action, participants in a shared mode of making. Performative and photographic representations of consent are not new—Johnson’s work, although remarkable, is not pioneering in this discussion. Within the past year, breach of sexual consent has seen an emerging presence in the artworld. Facebook recently exploded with images of Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz’s performative carrying of a mattress across her campus until her rapist is expelled or until she graduates. Earlier in 2014, Andrea Bowers’ exhibition “#sweetjane” at Pitzer and Pomona Colleges materialized the violence of social media in the wake of the Steubenville rape case. At another end of the spectrum, Johnson’s work builds on the over 30-year legacy of consenting photographs of sexual communities— Robert Mapplethorpe’s images of BDSM, Catherine Opie’s queer and kink portraits, and Nan Goldin’s documentary images of New York’s queer and trans* community.((Within a Canadian context, I am grateful for Sophie Hackett’s summer 2014 exhibition “Fan the Flames: Queer Positions in Photography,” at the Art Gallery of Ontario for its thorough and thoughtful treatment of queer sexuality in photography.))

To consider Johnson’s work within a framework of consent and collaboration places it within a lineage of queer and feminist works. In its performative aspect, it materializes consent, lays plain both Johnson’s welcome presence and a set of permissions for the camera. In its manipulations, it corrects the camera’s intrusions; its lack of subtlety, secrecy, even accuracy. Through her alterations of the image, Johnson also manifests her relationship as a responsible collaborator, whose care and attention to the nature of her subjects’ experience bleeds through her subsequent marks upon the photograph.

In an age populated with the ubiquitous and often invisible gaze of cameras, Johnson wrestles with the responsibilities of the photographer as a witness to intimacy. This is a political act. Not because depictions of sex are in any way uncommon in a contemporary society, but because Johnson believes they deserve due care. To picture sex not just as a caring, complex, and multifaceted act, but through a caring method, is to picture sexual agency. As a photographer-witness, Johnson visualizes at once the violence, the silliness, the enthusiasm and unsettling aspects of sex; weird stains, imperfect postures, fetishes, solitude. She describes a reluctance to portray a single dimension of sex. “I could have done just clowns,” she says. “I could have done just the violent ones, I could have done just the beautiful ones. But it’s not that—it’s everything.”

Johnson’s images also strike a powerful counterbalance to the kind of private, home-made nude photographs characteristic of an age of smartphones and DIY porn. A persistent attitude towards the wise and conscientious taking of “dirty” pictures may urge women not to show their faces, to obscure their identities in some way, to construct their image so as not be damaging to their reputation and professional life if leaked. Johnson, in both obscuring and in decisively not obscuring her subjects, attends to the realities of exposing nude images to the public. In wild colour, glitter, gashes, and careful incisions, she caricatures the notion that these sorts of manipulations might be necessary.

A further extension of the discussion of consent finds its place here, in a question of who such images are for, and who should be responsible for their public lives. Johnson, having ushered strangers’ photographs into a public forum, now demands that we not only look—curiously or lustfully or tentatively—but become party to the social experience, the social contract of formulating consent.

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Alison Cooley is a writer, curator, educator and podcaster based in Toronto. Her work deals with the intersection of natural history and visual culture, socially engaged artistic practice, craft histories, and experiential modes of art criticism.

This article was originally featured in BlackFlash Issue 32.1.