When You Are Tender, You Speak Your Plural
In his preface for A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, Wayne Koestenbaum writes that Roland Barthes proves “we get love through proxies; we can’t apprehend the thing itself, only the stylized miasma it stumbles through.” This I have always found to be potently linked to artistic practices—in the ways artists invent and experiment with calibrating these alchemic conditions (Barthes himself relied on literary examples); it also speaks to the yearning for the things that cannot be apprehended head-on, particularly in a moment when topicality dominates thought and language, and the self becomes ever more unmoored in the quicksand of reality.
Imagine encountering the thesis work of the Yale MFA Photography class of 2022, fifty years later, and one will likely struggle to find any concrete markers of the pandemic era and its other atrocities, yet riveting evidence of the times abound. The artists—Emily Barresi, Dylan Beckman, Anabelle DeClement, Amartya De, Eileen Emond, Ian Kline, Chinaedu Nwadibia, Brian Orozco, Rosa Polin, and Jessica Tang—spent their entire first year in isolation, often together; they collaborate intimately and conceptually, appearing in each other’s images, travels, discourses. They often begin working with what appears convenient and (beguilingly) accessible: family, close relations, familiar environments or (sub)cultural milieus, which, when approached without the didactics, can be the most challenging and Romantic subjects yet.
And by Romantic, I mean the engagement with an unknown or unknowable “other”: be it the lethargic entropy of places, the mysterious purposefulness of mundane rituals, passages of travel dictated by the rise and fall of tides, the intensity of chance encounters on road trips, generational space and aspirations, the allure and trappings of American white femininity, an almost forensic interest in bodily surfaces, or a hungover way of looking at daytime that also taps into the sporadic and accidental charm of Facebook vernacular photography. The languages vary accordingly, from cool yet poetically suffused straight photography to exuberant plays on material and texture; from fluid perspectives that accommodate the warped delirium of a world to experiments that subtly, methodically philosophize the apparatus itself. Where the works may feel unfamiliar or oddly specific, they (thankfully) don’t feel exotic, or exoticized.
For the artists, who have collectively landed on the title Romance Action Mystery, which is taken from the lyrics of a Big Thief song titled “Certainty,” love is the call to action. As the students wrote about this choice: “one first falls in love with the subject, then works to actively make the photograph. In its final being, the image is always imbued with some sense of mystery, despite any effort to describe the subject accurately.” But often that impetus began long before the identification of a subject matter, or even a commitment to the medium, where, for instance, experiencing the magic of printing directly from film reels as a child can cultivate the penchant to work with cinematic modes and tropes. Photography ultimately relates to love through curiosity. We have never been more aware, conversant, and wary of the medium, which ironically can be a liberating condition. I invoke Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse again for reformulating the question so exquisitely: “instead of trying to define the other (‘what is he?’), I turn to myself: what do I want, wanting to know you?”
Romance Action Mystery, the 2022 MFA Thesis Exhibition in Photography, will be open from April 26 through May 1 in Green Hall Gallery at Yale School of Art. It features the work of Emily Barresi, Dylan Beckman, Anabelle DeClement, Amartya De, Eileen Emond, Ian Kline, Chinaedu Nwadibia, Brian Orozco, Rosa Polin, and Jessica Tang.
Installation photography by Jackie Furtado.
Exhibition identity, publication, and website designed and developed by Hannah Tjaden and Mike Tully, Graphic Design MFAs ’22.